Sustainability of health and fitness information platform ecosystem

The roles of content producers, information receivers, and platform operators affect the stability of the governance of informational platforms. The purpose of this study was to identify and explore the sustainable factors of a platform ecosystem for health and fitness apps across Mainland China and Taiwan by interviewing producers, receivers, and operators. An advanced analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method was applied to derive expert perspectives from apps users and operators, live streamers, key opinion leaders, scholars, and officers across Mainland China and Taiwan via four dimensions and fourteen sub-dimensions of the initial health and fitness apps. The results revealed that the weights of the dimensions of health and fitness apps were sorted by content categories, content updates, user reviews, and platform terms; furthermore, the weights of the six highest sub-dimensions were the following: exercise, new feature, functionality, correctness, monitoring, and privacy. Content producers in Taiwan cared the most about the content category, whereas content producers in Mainland China cared the most about user reviews. Information receivers in Taiwan graded the content category the highest, whereas information receivers in Mainland China rated content updates the highest. Platform operators in Taiwan paid most attention to the platform terms, whereas the platform operators in Mainland China were most concerned with the content category. This comparative study can contribute to assisting the health and fitness industry across Mainland China and Taiwan area to provide an overall strategic operative process by identifying the effectiveness of the procedures, estimative processes, and cost reduction to enhance the competitiveness and further improve users’ experiences and satisfaction for the sustainability of health and fitness information platform Ecosystem.