JMIR Formative Research

Despite the effectiveness of bariatric surgery in the treatment of severe obesity, a substantial proportion of patients experience insufficient weight loss or weight regain over time. Evidence indicates that behavioral factors and mental health conditions play a central role in these outcomes, representing strategic targets for educational and technology-based self-monitoring interventions.

Consumer wearable activity monitors are increasingly being used as end points in exercise-oncology trials and in clinical decision-making, yet their accuracy is unvalidated in lung cancer, where slow, fragmented gait may challenge step-counting algorithms.

Breast cancer is a leading cause of mortality among Thai women. Breast self-examination (BSE) is a low-cost practice that promotes breast health awareness and familiarity with breast changes; however, adherence and correct technique remain suboptimal, partly due to limited guidance and reminder systems. Mobile health (mHealth) interventions could support BSE practice.

Physical activity, sedentary behavior, sleep, and eating behavior are recognized as key contributors to physical and mental health. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) can capture both the temporal variations and contextual correlates of these behaviors.

South Asian American gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBM) experience multiple minority stressors, such as internalized homophobia, racial prejudice, and homonegative discrimination, thereby elevating their risk of HIV. Due to the scarcity of HIV scientific literature focusing on South Asian American GBM, little is known about their use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) or the upstream factors influencing its uptake.

Patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) often struggle to develop and maintain heart-healthy physical activity habits, even after completing a cardiac rehabilitation program. Digital tools offer opportunities to support long-term behavior change in secondary prevention. The aktivplan digital health intervention (DHI) was designed to help patients establish heart-healthy physical activity routines.

Approximately one-third of Canadian children have insomnia or symptoms of insomnia, defined as chronic and frequent difficulties falling and/or staying asleep. Most health care providers (HCPs) in Canada do not receive comprehensive formal training in the screening, assessment, or management of pediatric insomnia.

Open-source, mid-scale large language models (LLMs) have emerged as scalable, privacy-preserving alternatives to ultra-large foundation models (eg, GPT-4) in health care systems. Techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enable sub-100-billion-parameter models to address highly specialized medical domains such as anesthesiology. However, studies evaluating RAG architectures on complex medical examinations remain scarce, highlighting the need for rigorous benchmarking to bridge the gap between raw parametric knowledge and clinically relevant application.

Electronic health record (EHR) data are being increasingly used for retrospective observational research through large, robust databases, and advanced data extraction tools.

Limited access to prenatal care, particularly in maternity care deserts and other underserved communities, contributes to maternal and fetal health disparities. Advances in telehealth and wearable fetal monitoring technologies, including fetal electrocardiography, offer opportunities to support remote fetal assessment and supplement traditional prenatal care. Understanding the acceptability of these technologies among potential users is important for informing future device development and implementation.

Many individuals use audiobooks at bedtime to unwind and facilitate sleep, yet little is known about how this practice relates to sleep health. Understanding these patterns may inform behavioral strategies to support sleep.

Accidents and injuries are the leading causes of preventable death among adolescents and are often related to substance use. About 60% of US high school students have tried alcohol and 22% report current alcohol use. Preventing and reducing adolescent alcohol use would contribute to substantial health benefits and prevent major health morbidity and mortality. Advances in interactive narrative learning technologies hold promise for designing games for health that effectively deliver age-appropriate and personalized behavior change interventions. The Interactive Narrative System for Patient-Individualized Reflective Exploration (INSPIRE) is designed to serve as an extension to clinical preventive care, engaging adolescents in a theoretically grounded alcohol prevention intervention by leveraging the dual mechanisms of interactive narrative and 3D game technologies.