JMIR Formative Research

Despite being established risk factors for poor mental or brain health outcomes in aging, rest-activity rhythm (RAR) disturbances are not routinely monitored or treated. This is, in part, due to a lack of clinician-friendly RAR monitoring systems.

A sedentary lifestyle is a global health crisis that contributes to chronic disease and premature mortality. Adolescents with mild intellectual disability attending Dutch practical education (PrO) schools face elevated health risks due to low levels of physical activity (PA) and limited conceptual, social, and practical skills. Digital health interventions offer scalable solutions, but require contextual adaptation informed by formative research. However, understanding of PA behavior in this population and context remains limited because existing research relies on partial lenses and lacks integration of theory, participatory methods, and multistakeholder insights.

The digitalization of health care has accelerated the adoption of mobile health (mHealth) apps in general and family medicine in Portugal. These tools may support chronic disease management and clinical decision-making. However, limited high-quality scientific evidence and the absence of a national framework for certification and quality standards create uncertainty about their safe integration into clinical practice.

The Dutch childcare benefits scandal (toeslagenschandaal) involved the wrongful labeling of thousands of parents as fraudsters in the childcare allowance system. This led to long-term harm for families and a profound trust crisis in governmental institutions. While the national recovery operation provided financial compensation, municipalities were tasked with offering broader support across life domains to youth who grew up in affected families. Central to this effort was helping them “come to terms” with the scandal by acknowledging, processing, and moving forward from its practical and emotional consequences. Yet, many youths remain hard to reach due to distrust and avoidance of institutional contact.

Defensive medicine (DM) is particularly relevant in obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN), where physicians face substantial medicolegal risks and malpractice-related pressures. Defensive practices may involve cost-increasing diagnostic or therapeutic behaviors and avoidance of high-risk patients or procedures. Identifying factors independently associated with DM may help inform organizational and medicolegal interventions.

Nonadherence to immunosuppressants and other self-management behaviors remains a major challenge after kidney transplantation. Publicly available mobile apps may support long-term self-management, but their quality and functional breadth remain unclear.

Hope and confidence support personal recovery by helping individuals with mental illness to rediscover meaning, enhance social connections, and build fulfilling lives. Digital recovery narrative interventions may help stimulate these recovery processes by providing access to hopeful lived-experience stories.

Suboptimal glycemic control remains a significant public health challenge among adults with type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, with 47.4% of US adults with diagnosed diabetes having hemoglobin A (HbA) ≥7%. Remote glucose monitoring programs have shown promise for supporting self-management, but real-world evidence on the causal impact of varying patient engagement levels on glycemic outcomes remains limited.

Emergency department (ED) boarding exposes admitted older adults to a high-disruption environment. Sleep loss during acute hospitalization is associated with adverse outcomes and may contribute to delirium, yet objective sleep measurement in this setting is difficult. Consumer multisensor wearables may permit low-burden, longitudinal measurement, but the feasibility and acceptability of ring-based monitoring among acutely ill older adults is unknown.

Informal caregivers make up a large share of the care provided to people living with dementia, and experience an elevated risk for anxiety, depression, and caregiving burden. Technology-based interventions, such as mobile apps, aim to support informal caregivers by providing information, training, and mental or social support. Considering the diverse nature of the caregiver experience, AI is being incorporated into such interventions to create more tailored and specific support; however, AI hesitancy may serve as a significant barrier to usage.

Shift-work nurses experience substantial variability in work schedules, health behaviors, and recovery patterns, which traditional retrospective surveys fail to capture due to recall bias. Although mobile health (mHealth) tools offer ecological momentary data capture, existing off-the-shelf survey platforms lack shift-synchronized notification logic and impose excessive cognitive friction on fatigued clinicians, limiting their applicability in nursing research.

Breast cancer survivorship requires attention to treatment-related changes in body composition, nutritional status, and quality of life. Bioelectrical impedance phase angle is influenced by tissue electrical properties and fluid distribution and may provide complementary whole-body and segmental information.