FSU associate professor Besiki Stvilia and FSU alumnus  Wonchan Choi recently published an exploratory study entitled “Mobile wellness application-seeking behavior by college students.” The duo examined how students obtain wellness information, including what wellness applications students use and for what purposes and how students found out about and select the wellness applications.

According to the study, students get most of their health information from websites, followed by applications and then family and friends. For the most part, students learned about wellness applications from search engines and from application stores. The research also showed that physicians were the least mentioned source of learning about wellness mobile applications and that the most popular application type was calorie and activity trackers. The study contributes to current research and practice in mobile wellness application design and the provision of mobile wellness services. In particular, it informs application designers and intermediaries such as search engines and student health and wellness centers about which mobile wellness applications students use, and how students search for and select those applications.

Dr. Stvilia currently teaches at FSU about a variety of topics including metadata and knowledge organization, data curation, information and data quality assurance, information behavior, and social informatics. Dr. Choi, currently a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, studies health information behavior of older adults and credibility assessment in online environments.

To read more about the study, click here.