JMIR Formative Research

Obesity affects more than one-quarter of adults in the United Kingdom and is a leading cause of preventable disease and health care costs. Digital behavior change programs can provide scalable weight management support, but maintaining engagement is challenging, and engagement is strongly associated with weight loss success. Tailoring interventions to cognitive-behavioral phenotypes, distinct patterns of thinking and behavior, offers one strategy to improve adherence. Although such approaches show promise in controlled settings, evidence from real-world digital programs is limited.

YouTube has become a popular platform for patients seeking health-related information, including guidance on managing benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). As self-diagnosis and self-treatment through online content grow more common, concerns have arisen regarding their influence on patients’ healthcare decisions and treatment outcomes. However, little is known about how YouTube use and self-treatment behaviors change before and after clinical consultation, or whether these behaviors affect standard care for BPPV.

In Argentina, diabetes is a growing public health concern, with a prevalence of 14% in 2024 and projections reaching 15.4% by 2050. In this context, a Diabetes Prevention and Care Program was implemented in low-income areas across 3 provinces. A key component of the program was a WhatsApp (WhatsApp LLC)-based intervention aimed at promoting self-care, encouraging healthy behaviors, and supporting follow-up among people with diabetes, those at risk, and pregnant women.

There is a shortage of services available to address the growing demand for mental health support in Australia and worldwide. Digital interventions, including conversational agents, can overcome barriers to accessing mental health support. The recent advances in large language models have led to an improvement in the perceived human-like naturalness of chatbot conversations, but there is little research on the experience of chatbots to support mental health. Manage your life online (MYLO) is a rule-based chatbot that was co-designed with young people and uses questions to help users explore their problems. In a case series conducted before the release of ChatGPT (OpenAI), users rated a new smartphone interface for MYLO as acceptable, and there was a large effect size for reduction in problem-related distress.

We derived a slogan summarizing contemporary physical activity guidance, “Move – Mix it up – Make it fun”, and created an infographic designed to illustrate these recommendations and support their use in physical activity campaigns.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), exemplified by ChatGPT and DeepSeek, is rapidly advancing and reshaping human-computer interaction with its growing reasoning capabilities and broad applications across fields such as medicine and education.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic created significant challenges but also a unique opportunity, accelerating the evolution of higher education, including dental education. This encouraged dental education to adopt more flexible modes like blended learning.

Patient-reported outcomes, including ecological momentary assessments (EMAs), are acquired from patients via repeated self-reports of their perceived momentary physical and emotional states before and after medical procedures. Patient-reported outcomes are used to measure health outcomes and quality of care. However, certain observable states or behaviors (eg, moods such as fatigue, hope, or medication adherence), or behaviors suggestive of health decline (eg, depression, cognitive decline), are not easily measured via self-reports in certain situations (eg, patients undergoing certain medical procedures, patients with dementia, and others). The peer-ceived momentary assessment (PeerMA) method involves support persons or peers (eg, family members and friends) to report their perception of a patient’s subjective physical and emotional states and has been validated in healthy populations.

Emerging adulthood is a high-risk period during which many with type 1 diabetes (T1D) demonstrate suboptimal diabetes management and glycemic control. There is a need for effective and scalable interventions designed specifically for this population. Technology-based approaches are readily accessed by this age group. Further, interventions that are consistent with self-determination theory (SDT) – which posits the fulfillment of psychological needs for autonomy, self-efficacy, and relatedness promote intrinsic motivation for change – may resonate well with emerging adults’ (EAs) developmental needs for establishing independence, autonomy, and growing their social network.

Digital platforms, particularly social media including Instagram, present unique opportunities for health promotion among adolescents due to their widespread use with interactive features supporting high user engagement. However, the feasibility of effectively utilizing platforms like Instagram for health interventions requires careful consideration of adolescent engagement patterns.

This viewpoint explores the role of conversational AI in educating the public on breast self-examination, using an interaction with DeepSeek AI as an example, where 6 AI generated responses to commonly asked questions were compared with guidelines published by organisations such as WHO. While the AI provided clear, accessible, and evidence-aligned responses consistent with professional guidance, limitations included oversimplification and absence of multimedia resources. These findings suggest that AI can support public health education but should be complemented by physician oversight and evidence-based resources for responsible use.

Diabetic foot complications are among the most severe and costly outcomes associated with diabetes, with high prevalence particularly in the Middle East and North Africa region. Current screening tools are often limited by subjectivity, invasiveness, or scalability challenges, underscoring the need for innovative approaches.