Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

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

Latest Submissions Open for Peer Review

JMIR has been a leader in applying openness, participation, collaboration and other "2.0" ideas to scholarly publishing, and since December 2009 offers open peer review articles, allowing JMIR users to sign themselves up as peer reviewers for specific articles currently considered by the Journal (in addition to author- and editor-selected reviewers).

For a complete list of all submissions across all JMIR journals as well as partner journals, see JMIR Preprints

Note that this is a not a complete list of submissions as authors can opt-out. The list below shows recently submitted articles where submitting authors have not opted-out of open peer-review and where the editor has not made a decision yet. (Note that this feature is for reviewing specific articles - if you just want to sign up as reviewer (and wait for the editor to contact you if articles match your interests), please sign up as reviewer using your profile).

To assign yourself to an article as reviewer, you must have a user account on this site (if you don't have one, register for a free account here) and be logged in (please verify that your email address in your profile is correct).

Add yourself as a peer reviewer to any article by clicking the '+Peer-review Me!+' link under each article. Full instructions on how to complete your review will be sent to you via email shortly after. Do not sign up as peer-reviewer if you have any conflicts of interest (note that we will treat any attempts by authors to sign up as reviewer under a false identity as scientific misconduct and reserve the right to promptly reject the article and inform the host institution).

The standard turnaround time for reviews is currently 2 weeks, and the general aim is to give constructive feedback to the authors and/or to prevent publication of uninteresting or fatally flawed articles. Reviewers will be acknowledged by name if the article is published, but remain anonymous if the article is declined.

The abstracts on this page are unpublished studies - please do not cite them (yet). If you wish to cite them/wish to see them published, write your opinion in the form of a peer-review!

Tip: Include the RSS feed of the JMIR submissions on this page on your homepage, blog, or desktop RSS reader to stay informed about current submissions!

JMIR Submissions under Open Peer Review

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Titles/Abstracts of Articles Currently Open for Review:

  • A Patient-Facing Mobile App for Biobank Research Transparency and Engagement: Participatory Design

    Date Submitted: Apr 12, 2024
    Open Peer Review Period: Apr 15, 2024 - Jun 10, 2024

    Background: Patient-derived biospecimens are invaluable tools in biomedical research. Currently, there are no mechanisms for patients to follow along and learn about the uses of their donated samples. Incorporating patients as stakeholders and meaningfully engaging them in biomedical research first requires transparency of research activities. Objective: Here we describe the process and results of using participatory design methods to build a mobile application in which breast cancer patients could learn about their biospecimens collected for research, the status of their use in research protocols, and about the breast disease biobank collection. This decentralized biobanking application (“de-bi”) provided patient-friendly interfaces overlaying institutional biobank databases. Methods: This research occurred in two phases. In Phase 1, we designed app screens containing different information that patients could learn about ongoing research involving their samples. Embedding these screen designs in a survey, we sought to gauge patients’ interests in receiving information about research or about their biospecimens. We engaged some survey respondents in short interviews to discern their views on the importance of having this information and their opinions on its presentation and design. We held a design workshop in which participants gave feedback on the screens and suggested improvements. For Phase 2, we then refined the user interfaces developed a functional app prototype. As we developed the app, we consulted institutional stakeholders to enhance compatibility with regulations and local data architectures. We then presented the app at a second workshop, where participants shared thoughts on usability and design of the app. In this phase we also conducted cognitive walkthroughs with individual participants to measure their success in using the app and to gain in-depth feedback on its functionality. Results: Survey and interview participants were interested in learning the status of their donated biospecimens (47%), the outcomes of research done on their specimens (30%), and in connecting with other patients similar to them. A design workshop assessing initial app screens revealed confusion in language and data presentation, though participants wanted to learn about their samples and expressed interest in using an app to do so. A second design workshop and cognitive walkthroughs assessed a functioning mobile app prototype integrated with institutional biobank data. These activities revealed further interest in the ability to track and learn about donated biospecimens. Half of participants struggled with the onboarding process. These results informed updates to the app design and functionality. Conclusions: Designing a patient-facing mobile app that displays information about biobanked specimens can facilitate greater transparency and engagement in biomedical research. Co-designing the app with patient stakeholders confirmed interest in learning about biospecimens and related research, improved presentation of data, and ensured usability of the app in preparation for a pilot study.

  • Usability, learnability, and trainability of the stay.safe Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis system

    Date Submitted: Mar 26, 2024
    Open Peer Review Period: Mar 26, 2024 - May 21, 2024

    Background: The design of Peritoneal Dialysis systems is critical for the safety and convenience of treatments. The stay.safe Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis system has been designed to facilitate convenient bag exchanges with reduced risk of contamination. Objective: Objective. To assess the usability, learnability and trainability of the stay.safe system for each step of bag exchanges. Methods: Eight peritoneal dialysis nurses with different degrees of experience with the stay.safe system were included in this qualitative interview study. Each nurse took part in a 90-minute assessment session. After watching the manufacturer’s training video, the nurses performed each step of the bag exchange, commented on their observations, and reported their experience from training patients on the system, if available. Results: The steps associated with connection, outflow, inflow, and disconnection were almost exclusively rated as easy or very easy to perform, to learn and to train. Features for preventing mistakes that could result in a risk of contamination, the possibility of handling the system with only one hand, and the stability of the organizer were considered particularly beneficial. Suggestions for improving the usability of the system aimed at labelling, increasing the size of the switch for the sake of patients with large hands or limited fine motor skills, and improving the training material. Conclusions: Learnability and trainability were mostly rated as easy or very easy and with no handling problems occurring. Overall, 86% of the nurses would recommend stay.safe to their patients. Patients with limited fine motor skills might benefit from a larger switch.

  • Background: The rapid growth of online medical services has highlighted the significance of smart triage systems in helping patients find the most appropriate doctors. However, traditional triage methods often rely on department recommendations, and are insufficient to accurately match patients’ textual questions with doctors' specialties. There is an urgent need to develop algorithms for recommending doctors. Objective: To develop and validate a patient-doctor hybrid recommendation model with response metrics (PDHR model) for better triage performance. Methods: A total of 646,383 online medical consultation records from the Internet Hospital of the First Affiliated Hospital of Xiamen University were collected. Semantic features representing patients and doctors were developed to identify the set of most similar questions and to semantically expand the pool of recommended doctor candidates, respectively. The doctors’ response rate was designed to improve candidate rankings. These three characteristics combine to create the PDHR model. Five doctors participated to evaluate the efficiency of the PDHR model through multiple metrics and questionnaires, as well as the performance of SBERT and Doc2Vec in text embedding. Results: The PDHR model reaches the best recommendation performance when the number of recommended doctors is 14. At this point, the model has an F1-score of 76.25%, a proportion of high-quality services of 41.05%, and a rating of 3.90. After removing doctors’ characteristics and response rates from PDHR model, the F1-score decreased by 12.05%, the proportion of high-quality services fell by 10.87%, the average hit ratio dropped by 1.06%, and the rating declined by 11.43%. According to whether those five doctors were hit by PDHR model, SBERT achieved an average hit ratio of 88.60%, while Doc2Vec achieved an average hit ratio of 53.40%. Conclusions: The PDHR model uses semantic features and response metrics to enable patients to accurately find the doctor that best suits their needs.