Lifestyle disease prevention: Health literacy, health attitude and mHealth

Abstract

Lifestyle disease has been a sprawling issue not only in Malaysia, but worldwide. In the literature, low health literacy and negative health attitude are the two main causal factors for high number of lifestyle disease. Meanwhile, mobile health or better known as mHealth is found to enhance health literacy and encourage positive health attitude. This study aims to find the relationship between health literacy, health attitude and lifestyle disease for residence in Malaysia. A total of 150 responses have been collected using a questionnaire posted via social media platforms. The findings revealed that there is a significant relationship between health literacy and lifestyle disease as well as health attitude and lifestyle disease. Majority of the respondents have been found to have low health literacy and negative health attitude too. A mHealth application with features of disease information, symptoms checker, calorie counter, medication information and exercise can be proposed with hope to improve health literacy and attitude of Malaysia residence. The proposed features are based on responses solicited from the questionnaire.