  Mobile systems offer portable and interactive computing, empowering users, to
exploit a multitude of context-sensitive services, including mobile healthcare.
Mobile health applications (i.e., mHealth apps) are revolutionizing the
healthcare sector by enabling stakeholders to produce and consume healthcare
services. A widespread adoption of mHealth technologies and rapid increase in
mHealth apps entail a critical challenge, i.e., lack of security awareness by
end-users regarding health-critical data. This paper presents an empirical
study aimed at exploring the security awareness of end-users of mHealth apps.
We collaborated with two mHealth providers in Saudi Arabia to gather data from
101 end-users. The results reveal that despite having the required knowledge,
end-users lack appropriate behaviour , i.e., reluctance or lack of
understanding to adopt security practices, compromising health-critical data
with social, legal, and financial consequences. The results emphasize that
mHealth providers should ensure security training of end-users (e.g., threat
analysis workshops), promote best practices to enforce security (e.g.,
multi-step authentication), and adopt suitable mHealth apps (e.g., trade-offs
for security vs usability). The study provides empirical evidence and a set of
guidelines about security awareness of mHealth apps.
