JMIR Human Factors

(Re-)designing health care and making health care interventions and technologies usable, safe, and effective

Editor-in-Chief:

Andre Kushniruk, BA, MSc, PhD, FACMI, School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Canada


Impact Factor 2.7

JMIR Human Factors (JHF, ISSN 2292-9495, Impact Factor: 2.7; Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Andre Kushniruk) is a multidisciplinary journal with contributions from design experts, medical researchers, engineers, and social scientists.

JMIR Human Factors focuses on understanding how the behaviour and thinking of humans can influence and shape the design of health care interventions and technologies, and how the design can be evaluated and improved to make health care interventions and technologies usable, safe, and effective. This includes usability studies and heuristic evaluations, studies concerning ergonomics and error prevention, design studies for medical devices and healthcare systems/workflows, enhancing teamwork through Human Factors based teamwork training, measuring non-technical skills in staff like leadership, communication, situational awareness and teamwork, and healthcare policies and procedures to reduce errors and increase safety.

JHF aspires to lead health care towards a culture of "usability by design", as well as to a culture of testing, error-prevention and safety, by promoting and publishing reports rigorously evaluating the usability and human factors aspects in health care, as well as encouraging the development and debate on new methods in this emerging field. Possible contributions include usability studies and heuristic evaluations, studies concerning ergonomics and error prevention, design studies for medical devices and healthcare systems/workflows, enhancing teamwork through human factors-based teamwork training, measuring non-technical skills in staff like leadership, communication, situational awareness and teamwork, and healthcare policies and procedures to reduce errors and increase safety. Reviews, viewpoint papers and tutorials are as welcome as original research.

All articles are professionally copyedited and typeset. JMIR Human Factors is indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, DOAJ, Scopus, PsychINFO, and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (Clarivate). In 2023, JMIR Human Factors received an inaugural Journal Impact Factor™ of 2.7 (Source: Journal Citation Reports™ from Clarivate, 2023).

Recent Articles

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Design and Usability of Consumer Health Tech and Home Monitoring Devices

Paranoia is a highly debilitating mental health condition. One novel intervention for paranoia is cognitive bias modification for paranoia (CBM-pa). CBM-pa comes from a class of interventions that focus on manipulating interpretation bias. Here, we aimed to develop and evaluate new therapy content for CBM-pa for later use in a self-administered digital therapeutic for paranoia called STOP (“Successful Treatment of Paranoia”).

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Design and Evaluation of Patient Education Materials

Telerehabilitation has gained significance as a tool to deliver and supervise therapy and training as effective as traditional rehabilitation methods yet more accessible and affordable. An exergame-based telerehabilitation system has recently been developed within the scope of the international Continuum-of-Care (COCARE) project. The system comprises training devices for use in clinics (Dividat Senso) and at home (Dividat Senso Flex), an assessment system, and a rehabilitation cockpit, and its focus lies on home-based motor-cognitive training, which is remotely managed by health care professionals (HPs).

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User-centred Design Case Studies

Mobile app development within mental health is often time- and resource-consuming, challenging the development of mobile apps for psychiatry. There is a continuum of software development methods ranging from linear (waterfall model) to continuous adaption (Scrum). Rapid application development (RAD) is a model that so far has not been applied to psychiatric settings and may have some advantages over other models.

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User Needs and Competencies

Most people with chronic conditions fail to adhere to self-management behavioral guidelines. In the last 2 decades, several mobile health apps and IT-based systems have been designed and developed to help patients change and sustain their healthy behaviors. However, these systems often lead to short-term behavior change or adherence while the goal is to engage the population toward long-term behavior change.

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Focus Groups and Qualitative Research with Users

e–Mental health interventions can improve access to mental health support for caregivers of people living with chronic kidney disease (CKD). However, implementation challenges often prevent effective interventions from being put into practice. To develop an e–mental health intervention for caregivers of people living with CKD that is optimized for future implementation, it is important to engage professionals that may endorse or deliver the intervention (ie, potential implementers) during intervention development.

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Focus Groups and Qualitative Research with Users

During the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the role of digital contact tracing (DCT) intensified. However, the uptake of this technology expectedly differed among age cohorts and national cultures. Various conceptual tools were introduced to strengthen DCT research from a theoretical perspective. However, little has been done to compare theory-supported findings across different cultural contexts and age cohorts.

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Design and Usability of Clinical Software and EHRs

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide and is considered a global epidemic. Despite the growing evidence on the effectiveness of mobile health interventions in the management of DM2, the evidence on the effect of mobile health interventions in prevention of DM2 is sparse. Therefore, we have developed an app aiming to promote initiation of behavioral change and adherence to healthy behavior. Before commencing a small-scale randomized controlled trial to assess the feasibility of using an app for initiation and adherence of healthy behavior in people at risk of DM2, testing the usability of the app in the target population is warranted.

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Focus Groups and Qualitative Research with Users

Increased use of eHealth technology and user data to drive early identification and intervention algorithms in early psychosis (EP) necessitates the implementation of ethical data use practices to increase user acceptability and trust.

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Design and Usability of Clinical Software and EHRs

Audit and feedback (A&F), the summary and provision of clinical performance data, is a common quality improvement strategy. Successful design and implementation of A&F—or any quality improvement strategy—should incorporate evidence-informed best practices as well as context-specific end user input.

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Design and Evaluation of Patient Education Materials

Currently, over 4000 bariatric procedures are performed annually in Switzerland. To improve outcomes, patients need to have good knowledge regarding postoperative nutrition. To potentially provide them with knowledge between dietetic consultations, a health bot (HB) was created. The HB can answer bariatric nutrition questions in writing based on artificial intelligence.

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Focus Groups and Qualitative Research with Users

While the use of telemedicine (TLM) increased worldwide during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known about the use and acceptance of TLM post the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Preprints Open for Peer-Review

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