Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a disruptive change within many areas. To control the pandemic, Contact Tracing Apps have been developed within a short time. Despite high investments, adoption and usage rates are lower than expected. Within our last paper (Quality and Success Criteria of Health Apps Against COVID-19), we investigated in a literature review which quality criteria and success factors are crucial for a Contact Tracing App.

In this paper, we verify our observed indications by testing our created hypotheses. With the help of a hypothetical pandemic scenario, we test the hypotheses within an empirical survey. Our findings provide more insights in the strength between the created hypotheses. It showed strong evidence between privacy and trust into the publisher, which followed into a better acceptance of the application. Other hypotheses like the transparency lead to more trust into the publisher had to be dismissed. Also, the strong supported hypotheses about a relation between technical barriers and the usage of the application had to be dismissed.

Our goal is to sharpen the understanding of the nonuse of the provided digital solution within the global pandemic. As our survey was done within the ongoing pandemic, our findings must be used with care, but could still give a valuable insight for future research, as well as for publishing contact tracing apps in case of a new pandemic.