JMIR Formative Research

Rural communities face persistent challenges in recruiting and retaining healthcare professionals. Research has shown that individuals from rural backgrounds are more likely to return to practice in these areas, yet most existing pipeline programs focus on undergraduate and medical students rather than high school students. Early exposure to healthcare careers is essential, as many students have already selected their career paths by the time they enter college. A previous study conducted in 2020 analyzed the effects of a single educational workshop at a rural high school in New Hampshire. The results suggested that students had a better understanding of the healthcare field.

Executive function encompasses a set of higher-order cognitive processes, including planning, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control, that are essential for goal-directed behavior. These abilities are adversely affected by age with executive dysfunction ultimately impairing performance on activities of daily living.

The negative consequences of caregiving can be mitigated by providing caregivers with support programs that increase their dementia care skills and provide emotional and tangible support. Web-based technology can increase the availability of evidence-based caregiver interventions. GamePlan4Care (GP4C) is a web-based adaptation of the Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer’s Caregiver Health II (REACH II) intervention, redesigned and reformatted for web-based delivery.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) individuals faced greater mental health challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic than binary-gender heterosexual (non-LGBTQ+) adults. The Together for Wellness/Juntos por Nuestro Bienestar website with free well-being resources, developed during the COVID-19 pandemic with partner input, included LGBTQ+ resources. A pilot evaluation among adults (aged ≥18 years) found engagement with and use of the website 4 to 6 weeks before follow-up was associated with reduced (pretest-posttest) depression. Results for LGBTQ+ participants were not reported.

Digital support for adolescent and young adult cancer survivors is fragmented and results in lacking a reliable overview of support services available to them. Collaborative design promises to integrate perspectives of diverse stakeholders and could help to develop an online platform, which increases access and has a long-term perspective. However, it has not yet been explored how collaborative design can be used more strategically to develop an online platform with these aims.

Football is the most widely played sport globally but carries a high risk of lower limb injuries, particularly among youth athletes. Real-time biomechanical monitoring can play a critical role in injury prevention. However, traditional lab-based systems are often complex and impractical for field use. Recent advances in wearable technology, such as inertial sensors and smart socks, provide more accessible solutions for movement analysis. The DAid® smart sock system is a promising tool, but further evidence is needed to support its use in lower extremity functional assessments.

Wearable self-tracking technologies are increasingly used in mental health care to enhance engagement and personalize treatment. However, most existing instruments focus on passive data collection or predefined symptom monitoring. Less attention has been given to tools that enable patients to actively track personally meaningful, self-defined mental health experiences as part of psychotherapy, particularly in vulnerable populations such as refugees with Complex PTSD (CPTSD).

Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors have been identified as a major cause of numerous health issues, with a steady global increase in their prevalence. Addressing this challenge requires comprehensive behavioral changes to promote the adoption of a sustainable healthier lifestyle. However, despite the prevalent need, cost-effective and successful digital coaching for health-related behavior change remains scarce.

Despite the known psychosocial challenges associated with supporting a loved one using alcohol and other drugs (AOD), there is a scarcity of mental health and wellbeing interventions for affected family members and friends (AFFMs). Stigma has also been shown to discourage help-seeking among AFFMs. Online interventions may facilitate help-seeking by ensuring privacy and anonymity.

Qualitative research appraisal is crucial for ensuring credible findings but faces challenges due to human variability. Artificial intelligence (AI) models have the potential to enhance the efficiency and consistency of qualitative research assessments.

To promote informed decision-making and maternal pertussis vaccination (MPV) uptake, we systematically developed an interactive, web-based decision aid for pregnant users. Intervention reach (the percentage of participants in the intervention group who used the intervention), use (how much and how long those participants used the intervention), and acceptability (how positively they evaluated the intervention) are essential for it to be effective and should be reported to assess which intervention components may have been effective.

The synthesis of evidence in healthcare is essential for informed decision-making and policy development. This study aims to validate The Umbrella Collaboration (TU), an innovative, semi-automatic tertiary evidence synthesis methodology, by comparing it with Traditional Umbrella Reviews (TUR), which are currently the gold standard.