JMIR Formative Research

Cisgender college women are vulnerable to HIV transmission but rarely use biomedical prevention tools such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). In the Orlando Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) of Florida, HIV vulnerability is elevated given the area’s high incidence rate (sixth among US cities). Increasing HIV and PrEP knowledge among cisgender college women can curb HIV incidence. One method of providing HIV education to cisgender college women and addressing the HIV and PrEP-related stigma is by training ambassadors through programs such as Maximizing Options to Advance Informed Choice for HIV Prevention (MOSAIC), which was developed for women and girls in Africa.

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Pneumonia accounts for approximately 1.4 million emergency department (ED) visits annually in the United States. Hybrid care models integrating telemedicine with in-home clinical support may offer a novel approach to managing appropriately selected patients while optimizing ED use.

Pregnancy is a critical life stage that requires comprehensive health management. Pregnancy health management apps offer accessible support for prenatal and postpartum care, yet behavioral factors and preferences influencing their adoption remain unclear.

The growth of the older adult population in Indonesia since 2019 has contributed to a 2.46% increase in dementia cases, with the number of cases projected to increase 2.5-fold by 2050. This trend is exerting a major impact on older adults and increasing the burden on caregivers. The current lack of systemic health support suggests that digital solutions—such as mobile health (mHealth) apps—have the potential to support caregivers and people living with dementia. However, to date, no mHealth initiatives have been developed through a participatory approach that involves users in the design process in accordance with the sociocultural conditions in Indonesia.

Suicide assessments have historically privileged verbal report by the patient, despite the fact that nonverbal behaviors of patients and their clinicians may convey important affective and interpersonal information about suicide risk. Recent advances in computational science enable efficient characterization of rich nonverbal data.

Personal narratives describing lived experiences of the entire spectrum of mental health challenges are now widely available to the public, including through autobiographies from public figures, thematic collections of narratives assembled by mental health organizations, and individual narratives published on video sharing services. Mental health lived experience narratives have been used as an “active ingredient” in interventions intended to create change, such as in campaigns against mental health stigma. In the narrative inquiry research approach, they are used to explore mental health phenomenology. Researchers and organizations working with mental health lived experience narratives have to contend with a wide range of legal and ethical challenges, such as how to handle narratives disclosing sensitive personal information about third parties and the ethical trade-off between preserving narrator autonomy over their presentation of personal identity and protecting narrators from harm due to mental health stigma if a narrator is identifiable in their narrative. In 2022, we formed the Interdisciplinary Consortium on Narratives in Context (ICONIC) of people with knowledge of narrative practices across disciplines. Members are engaged in health research, liberal arts, modern languages, history, and philosophy. In this viewpoint, we present four case studies of narrative practices by ICONIC members: (1) a narrative inquiry into the experiences of Ethiopian citizens with schizophrenia, (2) work to curate and share 2 collections of mental health recovery narratives, (3) an exploration of the use of poetic transcription to condense narrative interviews with mental health content, and (4) the development of safe approaches to working with personal narratives shared through an online mental health peer support service. In presenting these case studies, we focused on documenting decision-making on ethical and legal challenges as the best knowledge on ethical and legal decision-making regarding mental health lived experience narratives may come from integrating knowledge across disciplines. Through reflecting on these case studies, we identified cross-cutting challenges regarding consent processes, narrative analysis, and the interpretation and dissemination of data and findings. These challenges have transdisciplinary and disciplinary-specific features and can be used as a preliminary checklist in research design processes. In presenting what we learned, our intent was to demonstrate that greater knowledge on narrative practices can emerge through interdisciplinary contact and inform future decision-making on narrative practices by researchers working across disciplines. We conclude by contemplating interdisciplinary explorations with the potential to expand knowledge, including examining the use of pathographic narratives in philosophical inquiry.

Patient-centered clinical decision support (PC CDS) includes digital technology designed to give patients, caregivers, and clinicians evidence-based, patient-specific clinical guidance to inform care decisions. PC CDS interventions cover a range of use cases, but gaps in measurement make it difficult to assess the impact of these technologies on patient and clinician decision-making, care processes, and outcomes.

Suicidal ideation (SI) among university students is a growing public health concern. Self-report screening can be limited by concealment and delayed disclosure. We evaluated a leakage-resistant, proof-of-concept pipeline to detect SI from standardized smartphone-recorded speech.

Increasingly, individuals are seeking treatment for sexual health concerns through direct-to-consumer (DTC) telehealth platforms, and there is ongoing debate about whether such platforms can deliver safe and effective care.

Oral anticancer therapy enables convenient, home-based cancer care but can introduce adherence challenges, particularly with complex dosing schedules. Capecitabine is commonly used in breast cancer, often as adjuvant therapy or in advanced disease, and typically requires twice-daily dosing on cyclical schedules, increasing the risk of missed or incorrect doses. Low health literacy may exacerbate these difficulties, and emerging remote monitoring tools may help close this gap.

Baduanjin qigong is a traditional mind-body exercise used to support balance and physical health in older adults. Age-related changes in proprioception may make accurate self-directed performance difficult without external guidance.