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 3.9 More information about Impact Factor CiteScore 5.6 More information about CiteScore
Recent Articles

Virtual clinics allow doctors to connect to patients in difficult-to-reach locations. While this can result in improved access to care, implementing existing virtual clinics in these locations is difficult due to their contextual constraints. To address these challenges, a virtual clinic system for remote, rural, and underserved areas was developed based on user-centered design principles. To complete the user-centered design cycle, the developed system was then implemented and evaluated in the target contexts.


Despite increasing recognition of human factors in technologically advanced manufacturing, psychological resilience remains an underexplored dimension. Existing studies often rely on generic instruments that fail to capture the specific adaptive challenges faced by workers in high-tech environments. There is a growing need for context-sensitive tools capable of assessing resilience in line with the human-centric vision of Industry 5.0.

Patient safety classification systems are fundamental to surveillance, organizational learning, research, and governance because they enable adverse events and near misses to be organized into standardized categories for comparison and analysis. However, the increasing complexity of health information technology (HIT)–related patient safety incidents challenges the assumptions underpinning conventional classification approaches, as these incidents often emerge from dynamic, distributed, and evolving sociotechnical interactions rather than discrete, time-bounded events. In this Viewpoint, I argue that many of the challenges associated with classifying HIT-related patient safety incidents arise not simply from limitations of individual classification systems but from the inherent representational logic of classification itself. By viewing classification as a knowledge practice rather than merely a technical tool for organizing incident data, I contend that abstraction, boundary-setting, and standardization inevitably simplify complex sociotechnical processes and constrain how safety problems are represented, interpreted, and acted upon. I discuss 4 recurring representational limitations that characterize the application of patient safety classification systems to HIT-related incidents: fragmentation of sociotechnical interactions, loss of temporality and evolving processes, inadequate representation of scale and propagation across systems, and normalization of “use error” through simplified attribution of responsibility. These limitations can contribute to incomplete organizational learning, misaligned safety interventions, and challenges in interpreting and comparing classified patient safety data across health care settings. Rather than arguing against the continued use of patient safety classification systems, I propose that their strengths and limitations should be recognized simultaneously. Classification remains indispensable for surveillance, learning, and governance, but it should be interpreted as one component of a broader sociotechnical understanding of patient safety. Recognizing the representational limits of classification can support more reflexive interpretation of classification-based evidence and encourage complementary approaches that better capture the complexity of HIT-related patient safety.

Digital health technology enables collection of continuous physiological and behavioral data from participants in clinical trials. This supports hybrid trial designs, potentially reducing clinic visits and participant burden for patient monitoring. Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is characterized by an unpredictable clinical course, creating a need for new treatments and more sensitive approaches to assessing treatment effectiveness, disease progression, and clinically meaningful trial end points.

Older adults with cognitive impairment often face significant challenges in memoir writing, including memory fragmentation, emotional loneliness, and speech and language disorders. Although AI-generated content (AIGC) technologies such as GPT-3.5 show potential in creative tasks, they often lack the personalization and adaptability required for users with dementia. Generic AIGC tools often fail to address the heterogeneous cognitive and emotional needs of this population.

In the early stage of human-centered design (HCD), qualitative and generative methods are commonly used to explore patients’ contexts and needs, emphasizing active patient involvement to ensure that design insights accurately reflect real experiences and enhance both design effectiveness and patient empowerment. However, certain challenges arise in the early stage of the HCD process, including (1) high vulnerability of patient participants, (2) less diverse and representative patient groups due to recruitment challenges, and (3) insufficient problem framing across diverse patient experiences.

In mobile health care, text messages play an important role in improving physical activity. Recent studies have developed message banks based on theories, including the behavior change technique (BCT) taxonomy. However, little evidence is available for individual differences (ie, who responds to which BCTs presented in messages), which is crucial for optimizing message delivery.

Health-related technology use among nondigitally native adults is becoming widespread. Nevertheless, digital health interventions are typically not designed with the unique usability needs and preferences of this population in mind. Furthermore, most of these middle-aged and older adults are managing multiple medical conditions, which can also impact their preferences related to digital health interventions. A prime opportunity to address multimorbidity in nondigital natives using a digital health intervention is the intersection between mental health and chronic pain.

Removal platforms for nonconsensual intimate images (NCIIs) are essential, as they have become the recourse for victims of such abuse; yet their interfaces are not designed around the cognitive and emotional realities of trauma. Safety by Design directs platforms to protect vulnerable users but not how; trauma-informed care defines what that protection requires, while usability heuristics keep interfaces usable but are not themselves trauma-sensitive. However, no framework integrates them into design guidance that is both usable and protective for NCII removal platforms.

AI tools have the potential to enhance personalized clinical care, particularly in radiology. However, their integration into clinical workflows remains complex, especially in pediatric oncology, where early cancer detection is critical. Children with Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS), a rare cancer predisposition disorder, undergo regular surveillance whole-body magnetic resonance imaging (wbMRI), which presents an opportunity for AI-assisted tumor detection.
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