ArticleBritish journal of health psychology2025
Living well? The unintended consequences of highly popular commercial fitness apps through social listening using Machine-Assisted Topic Analysis: Evidence from X.
Article in British journal of health psychology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- User-Reported Issues With Mental Health Apps: Machine-Assisted Topic Analysis of Social Media Posts.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2026Article
- Co-designing a culturally appropriate mHealth physical activity intervention for midlife women experiencing menopause in Saudi Arabia: stakeholder recommendations.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Living well? The unintended consequences of highly popular commercial fitness apps through social listening using Machine-Assisted Topic Analysis: Evidence from X.British journal of health psychology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesUse artificial intelligence-Human collaboration to investigate the unintended consequences of the most popular commercial fitness apps through social listening via X (formerly Twitter) posts.
designMachine-assisted topic analysis (MATA).
methodsX posts (n = 58,881) referring to the five most profitable fitness apps were collected via application programming interface and filtered for negative sentiment, resulting in 13,799. MATA was used to generate a structural topic model. This organized the data into topics and provided 20 representative posts per topic for further qualitative analysis, informed by a thematic analysis approach.
resultsSix topics were generated by machine analysis and subsequently retained as independent themes during human analysis. These reflected key challenges and unintended consequences of using commercial fitness apps, including negative psychological and behavioural impacts. These centred around the challenges of quantifying real-world activities, implications for accuracy, difficulties associated with achieving algorithm-set goals, and subsequent negative impacts on emotions, motivations, and engagement with apps and health behaviours more generally.
conclusionsThis study highlights the negative behavioural and psychological consequences of commercial fitness apps as reported by users on social media. Our findings suggest that these may undermine the apps' potential to promote health behaviour change and well-being. This highlights the need for a more user-centred app design based on psychological theory, prioritizing well-being and intrinsic motivation over rigid, quantitative goals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.