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In recent years, the growing popularity of wearable fitness or health devices has inundated the consumer market, including wristbands (e.g., Fitbit and Jawbone), smart watches, and wearable body metric textile (Swan, 2012). As a particular form of Internet of Things, wearables are often equipped with internet connectivity, either via sensors embedded in the device (O’Brien, 2015) or by connecting with a smartphone (Canhoto & Arp, 2017). They can track, store, and transmit health and wellness data such as heart rate, sleep, steps, blood pressure, and body temperature (Weber, 2015). According to Business Insider (Phaneuf, 2021), about 62.2 million US consumers are estimated to adopt wearables by 2020, and the number will increase to 72.6 million by 2024, accounting for 27.1% of the US population. It is uncertain, however, whether these wearables will survive and gain their own market position alongside smartphones or tablet personal computers, because they are often viewed as optional accessories and not a necessity (Cho et al., 2019; Matte, 2015). Adding to this uncertainty, studies on the post-adoption behavior began to show that the user attraction was decreasing, showing a significant drop in the usage after a short period of time (Lazar et al., 2015). According to Canhoto and Arp (2017), nearly half the consumers stopped using their wearables within the first six months. This discussion has shaped the research focus of the current project: What influences consumers to continue to use their wearables?
A growing number of studies have focused on the adoption and use of wearable fitness devices (e.g., Kalantari, 2017; Liu & Han, 2020). Multiple factors including perceived ease of use (e.g., Kim & Chiu, 2019), perceived usefulness (e.g., Cheung et al., 2019; Kim & Chiu, 2019), visibility (Chuah et al., 2016), and social influences (e.g., Cheung et al., 2019) have shown to positively affect consumer acceptance or adoption of wearables. In addition, attitude, perceived usefulness (Kim & Shin, 2015) and design aesthetics (Muller & Klerk, 2020) are found to affect consumer use intention. Research questions remain such as what factors influence wearables users’ post-adoption behavior. A handful studies have started to examine intermittent discontinuance (Shen et al., 2018), which is “temporarily discontinuing the use of information technology and readopting it later (p. 508),” and dissatisfaction and attrition (Coorevits & Coenen, 2016; Lazar et al., 2015).