Design and Governance of Mhealth Data Sharing

The proliferation of mobile health (mHealth)-namely, mobile applications along with wearable and digital health devices-has helped to generate a growing amount of heterogeneous data. To increase devices' and apps' value via facilitating new ways to use data, mHealth companies often provide a Web application programming interface (API) to their cloud data repositories, which enables third-party developers to access end users' data after receiving their consent. Managing such data sharing requires making design and governance decisions that maintain the tradeoff between promoting generativity to facilitate complementors' contributions and retaining control to prevent undesirable platform use. However, despite the increasing pervasiveness of Web data-sharing platforms, researchers have not sufficiently analyzed their design and governance. By relying on boundary resource theory and analyzing documents about 21 Web data-sharing platforms, we identify and 18 design and governance decisions that mHealth companies must make to manage data sharing and discuss their role in maintaining the tradeoff between platform generativity and control.