Recent Articles
Relational agents (RAs) have shown effectiveness in various health interventions with and without doctors and hospital facilities. In situations such as a pandemic like the COVID-19 pandemic when health care professionals (HCPs) and facilities are unable to cope with increased demands, RAs may play a major role in ameliorating the situation. However, they have not been well explored in this domain.
Despite young First Nations Australians being typically healthy, happy, and connected to family and culture, high rates of emotional distress, suicide, and self-harm are also observed. Differing worldviews of service providers and First Nations young people regarding illness and treatment practices, language differences, culturally inappropriate service models, geographical remoteness, and stigma can all inhibit access to appropriate mental health support. Mental health treatments delivered digitally (digital mental health; dMH) offer flexible access to evidence-based, nonstigmatizing, low-cost treatment and early intervention on a broad scale. There is a rapidly growing use and acceptance of these technologies among young First Nations people.
Patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) carry a clinically significant symptom burden, have alterations in function (eg, impaired ability to chew, swallow, and talk), and decrease in quality of life. Furthermore, treatment impacts social activities and interactions as patients report reduced sexuality and shoulder the highest rates of depression across cancer types. Patients suffer undue anxiety because they find the treatment incomprehensible, which is partially a function of limited, understandable information. Patients’ perceptions of having obtained adequate information prior to and during treatment are predictive of positive outcomes. Providing patient-centered decision support and utilizing visual images may increase understanding of treatment options and associated risks to improve satisfaction with their decision and consultation, while reducing decisional conflict.
Digital health apps are among the most visible facets of the ongoing digital transition in health care, with mental health–focused apps as one of the main therapeutic areas. However, concerns regarding their scientific robustness drove regulators to establish evaluation procedures, with Germany’s Digitale Gesundheitsanwendungen program pioneering in app prescription with costs covered by statutory health insurance. Portugal gathers a set of conditions and requirements that position it as an excellent test bed for digital health apps. Its daunting mental health landscape reinforces the potential interest in new interventions. To understand if they would be acceptable, we need to understand the supply side’s attitudes and perceptions toward them, that is, those of psychiatrists and psychologists.
Access to health care for an aging population with growing needs presents major challenges in northern Sweden’s sparsely populated regions. Few people, the lack of professionals, and long distances make it difficult to provide health care on equitable terms according to the Swedish legislation. Remote treatment (RT) using information and communication technology has been suggested to overcome these difficulties, and person-centered care (PCC) is a desired philosophy to improve the quality of health care. However, there is scarce knowledge about how patients experience RT meetings.
Digital tools are increasingly used on a population level as a weight loss strategy for people living with overweight and obesity. Evidence supports the feasibility of digital tools for the management of obesity in a community setting, but there is only emerging evidence for the feasibility of such tools in specialist weight management services. No study has assessed the uptake of digital tools among patients awaiting their first appointment with a specialist weight management service.
A repository of retinal images for research is being established in Scotland. It will permit researchers to validate, tune, and refine artificial intelligence (AI) decision-support algorithms to accelerate safe deployment in Scottish optometry and beyond. Research demonstrates the potential of AI systems in optometry and ophthalmology, though they are not yet widely adopted.
Young people are more likely to be affected by suicide contagion, and there are concerns about the role social media plays in the development and maintenance of suicide clusters or in facilitating imitative suicidal behavior. However, social media also presents an opportunity to provide real-time and age-appropriate suicide prevention information, which could be an important component of suicide postvention activities.
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, AI-powered chatbots, such as Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer (ChatGPT), have emerged as potential tools for various applications, including health care. However, ChatGPT is not specifically designed for health care purposes, and its use for self-diagnosis raises concerns regarding its adoption’s potential risks and benefits. Users are increasingly inclined to use ChatGPT for self-diagnosis, necessitating a deeper understanding of the factors driving this trend.
Acquired brain injury (ABI) is a leading cause of death and disability in children and can lead to lasting cognitive, physical, and psychosocial outcomes that affect school performance. Students with an ABI experience challenges returning to school due in part to lack of educator support and ABI awareness. A lack of knowledge and training contribute to educators feeling unprepared to support students with ABI. Teach-ABI, an online professional development module, was created to enhance educators’ ABI knowledge and awareness to best support students. Using a case-based approach, Teach-ABI explains what an ABI is, identifies challenges for students with ABI in the classroom, discusses the importance of an individualized approach to supporting students with ABI, and describes how to support a student with an ABI in the classroom.
Reducing lifestyle risk behaviors among adolescents depends on access to age-appropriate health promotion information. Chatbots—computer programs designed to simulate conversations with human users—have the potential to deliver health information to adolescents to improve their lifestyle behaviors and support behavior change, but research on the feasibility and acceptability of chatbots in the adolescent population is unknown.
