JMIR Human Factors

Many patients attending hospital emergency services with recent-onset eye symptoms could have been managed in the community. This may reflect a lack of specialist experience or triage capacity among primary care providers. Online triage tools collect patient symptomatology and relevant ophthalmic and medical history virtually, compile a report, and suggest an outcome decision which can support the streaming and direction of patients to a suitable service within an appropriate timeframe.

Internet hospitals are playing a significant role in medical care with their potential to provide widely accessible outpatient service delivery via information technologies. Current research on patients’ satisfaction with internet hospitals mainly focus on physician-patient relationship and patient demand, and less is considered about the whole process of online consultation.

HIV disproportionately affects men who have sex with men (MSM), transgender individuals, and people who inject drugs, with 70.1% of cases in Pakistan linked to these groups, aggravated by stigma and legal constraints. Mobile health (mHealth) interventions offer the potential to enhance HIV prevention, yet their acceptability remains underexplored.

Asthma-related deaths in the United Kingdom are the highest in Europe, and only 30% of patients access basic care. There is a need for alternative approaches to reaching people with asthma to provide health education, self-management support, and better bridges to care.

Suboptimal design of infusion pumps may lead to usage errors, thereby compromising patient safety. Usability evaluation enables medical device design teams to identify and rectify design-related usability issues in a timely manner. Nevertheless, existing research on infusion pump usability continues to exhibit limitations in aspects such as task design.

Although medication reconciliation is known to reduce the frequency of medication errors, its practical implementation can be challenging in several respects. In our institution, pharmacy students perform medication reconciliations at admission under the supervision of a pharmacist or pharmacy resident.

Loneliness among older adults has become a major public health concern associated with cognitive decline, depression, and increased health care use. The advancement of digital health technologies such as wearable devices, smart home systems, and mobile health apps provides new opportunities to monitor and mitigate loneliness through continuous physiological and behavioral assessment. However, the effectiveness of such technologies largely depends on user interface design, ensuring that older adults can understand, trust, and comfortably engage with the technology. Existing research on interactive platforms and user interfaces for psychological and emotional monitoring has mainly focused on usability testing and technology feasibility, with limited attention to structured design frameworks that integrate psychological, emotional, and accessibility dimensions for older adults. Furthermore, most studies rely on qualitative assessments and lack quantitative prioritization of design indicators.

Providing tailored information is an essential part of health care. However, physicians often lack time for detailed education during the consultation. An additional, tailored digital health information service (DHIS) could help physicians meet their patients’ information needs regardless of time and place and extend physician-patient communication to the digital realm.

Pulse palpation is essential for accurate traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis. However, this tactile-sensory-dependent technique is not feasible in teleconference, leaving traditional Chinese medicine underserved by conventional tele-practice frameworks. To address this, we developed an Assistive Pulse Data Collection (APDC; Logistics and Supply Chain MultiTech R&D Centre) device.

Mammograms are the most readily used procedures for early breast cancer detection but are notorious for the discomfort they induce in patients. This physiological strain has been validated by many questionnaire-based investigations, some of which indicate that it may discourage and deter women from potentially lifesaving health care. While informative, these subjective measures are highly variable and do not provide an objective perspective regarding the coordinated physiological and ergonomic response required for the procedure.

Instructional documents are crucial for safely operating medical devices. However, few studies have explicitly considered designing instructions for health care professionals (HCPs). Psychological research suggests that advanced learners with prior expertise in a domain are better able to generalize their existing knowledge to new areas compared to those with little prior expertise, resulting in different informational needs.

Recruiting patients in primary care research remains challenging due to clinical workload, staffing constraints, and the need to limit disruption to routine care. Traditional recruitment methods often place a substantial burden on clinics, prompting research teams to adopt low-burden and scalable approaches such as email-based recruitment. Despite its growing use, limited empirical evidence describes how email recruitment campaigns are designed and how they perform when targeting primary care patients in real-world settings.