JMIR Formative Research

Internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT) is an effective and convenient means of offering cognitive behavioral therapy to the general population. To increase access to ICBT among Canadian public safety personnel (PSP)—a group that experiences elevated rates of mental health concerns and barriers to mental health care—a clinical research unit called PSPNET has tailored ICBT to PSP, primarily through offering case stories and PSP-specific examples within an ICBT program. PSPNET’s first and most frequently used ICBT program, called the PSP Wellbeing Course, has been found to reduce symptoms of mental disorders (eg, anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress) among PSP. Little research, however, has investigated clients’ perceptions of the case stories in this course.

Older adults have a high rate of loneliness, which contributes to increased psychosocial risk, medical morbidity, and mortality. Digital emotional support interventions provide a convenient and rapid avenue for additional support. Digital peer support interventions for emotional struggles contrast the usual provider-based clinical care models because they offer more accessible, direct support for empowerment, highlighting the users’ autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Diapers are commonly used by older patients with urination disorders. A smart diaper system (SDS) may be able to estimate the weight of urine comparably to conventional measurements made by weighing diapers.

In Taiwan’s public health system, community-based pharmacists are key first-line health care providers due to their high accessibility. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the pharmacists played a central role in the distribution of these supplies through the Name-Based Rationing System (NBRS), during an acute shortage of masks and testing kits, that helped reduce the spread of the disease. The NBRS, an innovative government-guided strategy developed after the COVID-19 outbreak, provided equitable and convenient access to masks and COVID-19 test kits.

High levels of physical activity are key to improving health outcomes, yet many people fail to take action. Using pedometers to target steps per day and providing financial incentives is a simple and scalable approach to promoting public health. However, conventional pedometers do not account for “intensity” and “duration,” making it challenging to efficiently increase people’s moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), which is expected to improve health outcomes. Based on these rationales, we developed a smartphone app that sets step cadence as a goal (defined as a daily challenge of walking more than 1500 steps in 15 minutes twice a day, which is a heuristic threshold for moderate physical activity) and provides financial incentive when the challenge is met.

University students, who often live in close quarters and engage in frequent social interaction, face a heightened risk of influenza morbidity. Still, vaccination rates among this group, particularly Chinese students, remain consistently low due to limited awareness and insufficient access to vaccinations.

Physician use of stigmatizing language in the clinical documentation of hospitalized adults with opioid use is common. However, patient factors associated with stigmatizing language in this setting remain poorly characterized.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated their use across various domains. Psychiatric interviews, which are goal-oriented and structured, represent a significantly underexplored area where LLMs can provide substantial value. In this study, we explore the application of LLMs to enhance psychiatric interviews by analyzing counseling data from North Korean defectors who have experienced traumatic events and mental health issues.

There is a growing public health evidence base focused on understanding the links between drinking contexts and alcohol consumption. However, the potential value of developing context-based interventions to help people drinking at increasing and higher risk levels to cut down remains underexplored. Digital interventions, such as apps, offer significant potential for delivering context-based interventions as they can collect contextual information and flexibly deliver personalized interventions while addressing barriers associated with face-to-face interventions, such as time constraints.

As individuals age, the incidence and mortality rates of cerebrovascular accidents significantly rise, leading to fine motor impairments and cognitive deficits that impact daily life. In modern occupational therapy, assessing manual dexterity and cognitive functions typically involves observation of patients interacting with physical objects. However, this pen-and-paper method is not only time-consuming, relying heavily on therapist involvement, but also often inaccurate. Digital assessment methods, therefore, have the potential to increase the accuracy of diagnosis, as well as decrease the workload of health care professionals.

The growing concern on adolescent mental health calls for proactive early detection and intervention strategies. There is a recognition of the link between digital phenotypes and mental health, drawing attention to their potential use. However, the process of collecting digital phenotype data presents challenges despite its promising prospects.

Emerging evidence suggests a positive association between relevant aspects of one’s psychological identity and physical activity engagement, but the current understanding of this relationship is primarily based on scales designed to assess identity as a person who exercises, leaving out essential aspects of physical activities (eg, incidental and occupational physical activity) and sedentary behavior.