JMIR Formative Research

Measurement-based care (MBC) and shared decision-making can improve clinical outcomes for patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) in primary care. However, primary care providers often have limited time to administer patient-reported outcome measures recommended for MBC. Digital health tools like the Pathway Platform can help facilitate MBC and patient-provider engagement, aiding enhanced shared decision-making.

Obesity is a chronic disease requiring long-term treatment, yet current treatment models do not align with the chronicity of obesity. Current guidelines provide limited direction on how to adapt treatment to support weight loss maintenance as adolescents transition into emerging adulthood, a distinct developmental period from the late teens to the mid-to-late twenties.

Older adults living with dementia often have limited tolerance for intraoral procedures, which can restrict access to even basic oral health assessment in clinical care. Procedural burden—characterized by sustained intraoral manipulation, sensory overload, and limited opportunities for interruption—may represent a key barrier to equitable oral care. Intraoral scanning (IOS) enables stepwise, interruptible acquisition of oral data and may reduce this burden, but feasibility and tolerability in people living with dementia have not been systematically evaluated.

Telemedicine offers promising solutions for improving access to care among older adults with chronic conditions, but there is limited evidence on how older patients navigate and engage with video telehealth in their home environments.

Clinical course information, including disease onset, episode recurrence, and hospitalization history, is essential for psychiatric care and research. However, these data are embedded in unstructured clinical narratives with substantial linguistic variability, making manual extraction labor-intensive and rule-based extraction difficult to scale. Fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) may flexibly extract such information from privacy-sensitive psychiatric records.

While technology can widen access to mental health treatments, digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) frequently have low engagement and high dropout rates. A better understanding of user engagement with DMHIs can help researchers design technologies that users are more likely to benefit from. However, a major challenge is that the term “engagement” is very broad, not well-understood, and operationalized differently across projects. Few studies have explored how clinical researchers define and operationalize engagement in DMHI research.

Adolescents and young adults with chronic health conditions often struggle to adhere to their daily oral medications. Transdiagnostic mobile health (mHealth) interventions have the potential to promote medication adherence by reaching youth at a large scale.

Infant feeding practices, including breastfeeding, are known to benefit maternal and child health outcomes. Therefore, parent access to evidence-based infant feeding advice is critical. In recent years, there has been increased use of digital health technologies to support infant feeding. Despite its potential, using AI to complement existing health care and connect families to timely infant feeding support remains relatively unexplored.

Epidemiological and biological risks frequently expose Caribbean territories to emerging infectious threats. Martinique, a French overseas territory, is particularly vulnerable due to its tropical climate, insular geography, and recurrent exposure to arboviral epidemics. During exceptional health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, health care systems must rapidly adapt to a potentially sustained patient influx, evolving scientific knowledge, and heightened population anxiety. In March 2020, following the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in Martinique, the emergency medical service (EMS) implemented a teleconsultation follow-up unit dedicated to home-based patients with suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection, in the context of uncertainty regarding disease progression.

Sense of agency (SoA) is the subjective experience of controlling one’s actions and their effects in the world. SoA is important for behavioral change and goal achievement, and its measurement via digital devices has gained attention in health promotion and therapeutic interventions.

Enrollment in phase I oncology trials remains low largely because potentially eligible patients are not identified and evaluated quickly enough. Current clinical trial matching systems can identify candidate patients from the electronic health record, but cases with missing or uncertain eligibility data are often routed for offline manual review. This delay impedes clarification and prolongs the final eligibility determination.

Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is increasingly used in digital health research to capture behaviors, symptoms, and psychological states in real time and in natural environments, offering advantages over traditional retrospective measures in terms of ecological validity and reduced recall bias. Despite the potential of EMA for advancing mobile health and digital phenotyping apps, accessible technical solutions that enable researchers without software engineering expertise to design and deploy EMA studies remain limited.