JMIR Human Factors

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.

The German Corona-Warn-App (CWA) is a contact tracing app to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2. As of today, it has been downloaded approximately 45 million times.

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.

The expansion of cellular phones in sub-Saharan Africa spurred the development of SMS text message–based mobile health (mHealth) technology. Numerous SMS text message–based interventions have attempted to increase retention in care for people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of these interventions have failed to scale. Understanding theory-grounded factors leading to mHealth acceptability is needed to create scalable, contextually appropriate, and user-focused interventions to improve longitudinal HIV care for people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

Medication adherence is a global public health challenge, as only approximately 50% of people adhere to their medication regimens. Medication reminders have shown promising results in terms of promoting medication adherence. However, practical mechanisms to determine whether a medication has been taken or not, once people are reminded, remain elusive. Emerging smartwatch technology may more objectively, unobtrusively, and automatically detect medication taking than currently available methods.

In 2019, Germany launched the Digital Healthcare Act. The reform enables physicians to prescribe health apps as treatments to their statutory-insured patients.