Mobile health-monitoring services (MMSs) empower patients with chronic illnesses to self-manage their health concerns; however, in practice, many patients become inactive users after employing MMSs for a short time. The reasons for this usage pattern remain unclear. By extending the literature that focuses on the cognitive reasoning behind system usage, our study takes an affect transfer perspective to examine how these patients develop emotional attachment to MMSs that subsequently drives their usage. Drawing on affect transfer theory, we hypothesize that patients’ satisfaction with MMS components influences their emotional attachment to the service through both cognitive and misattribution routines, and that the combined effects of these two routines are contingent on patients’ health rationality. Our hypotheses are tested with survey data collected from 228 patients with chronic illnesses. This study contributes to the mobile health (mHealth) literature by investigating patients’ actual behavior based on their interactions with MMSs from an affect transfer perspective. It also informs service providers of MMSs regarding how to motivate service usage by patients with chronic illnesses by adopting a strategic design.

移动健康监测服务（MMS）使患有慢性病的患者能够自我管理他们的健康问题；但是，实际上，许多患者在短时间内使用MMS后就变成了不活跃的用户。这种使用方式的原因尚不清楚。通过扩展针对系统使用背后的认知推理的文献，我们的研究从情感转移的角度来研究这些患者如何发展对MMS的情感依恋，从而推动其使用。基于情感转移理论，我们假设患者对MMS组件的满意程度会通过认知和错误归因程序影响他们对服务的情感依恋，并且这两种程序的结合效果取决于患者的健康合理性。我们从228名慢性病患者中收集的调查数据检验了我们的假设。这项研究通过从患者影响转移的角度研究患者与MMS的相互作用来研究其实际行为，从而为移动健康（mHealth）文献做出了贡献。它还通过采用战略性设计，向MMS的服务提供商告知有关如何激励慢性病患者使用服务的信息。