JMIR Formative Research

Health care public reporting (PR) systems are intended to reduce information asymmetry and support informed health care decision-making. However, their adoption remains limited, partly because health care information is complex, difficult to interpret, and may evoke cognitive and emotional responses. Existing research has focused largely on system design and development, with limited attention to how users’ central and peripheral-route information-processing mechanisms shape PR system adoption.

Informal caregivers play a central role in long-term care but experience elevated risks of stress, depressive symptoms, and caregiver burden, alongside barriers to accessing preventive support. Low-threshold digital public health interventions may offer scalable support; however, evidence on their feasibility, usability, and contextual fit remains limited, particularly for heterogeneous caregiver populations.

Depression is a prevalent psychiatric condition with functional and socioeconomic consequences. Understanding the barriers to professional help-seeking and treatment acceptance among individuals with depressive symptoms is important.

Wearable physiological sensing and mobile self-report methods offer new opportunities for monitoring occupational well-being in real-world settings. However, interpreting continuous physiological signals in relation to psychological states such as job burnout and work engagement remains challenging, particularly when using deployable systems that rely on proprietary signal processing.

Abnormal reward processing is considered a core feature of severe mental illness (SMI). Deficits in this domain can have severe implications for daily functioning. The Online Positive Valence Study aimed to assess reward processing in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia using the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Positive Valence Systems (PVS) framework in an online task-based study. Recruitment and study adherence fell short of expectations.

Caring Contacts is a low-cost and low-resource suicide prevention intervention that involves sending a series of nondemanding messages that convey care and support. While Caring Contacts is well studied among veteran and adult populations, intervention implementation preferences remain underexplored for adolescents and young adults, especially regarding its delivery in primary care settings. As primary care clinicians are often constrained in their capacity to respond to the time-sensitive needs of these patients while they wait to be connected to specialty care, identifying whether current technologies that can help alleviate these time barriers are acceptable to adolescents and young adult patients is an important next step.

The integration of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) into routine clinical practice remains limited despite their well-documented benefits in facilitating clinical communication and research. Systematic digital PRO collection can enable real-time symptom monitoring, timely clinical interventions, and greater patient empowerment. The Health Outcomes Observatory (H2O) initiative was developed to enable systematic digital patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) collection and integration with clinical data to support value-based, patient-centered care across health care systems.

Physical and psychological distress symptoms can adversely affect daily functioning and quality of life, highlighting the need for accessible self-management support. Although mobile health (mHealth) interventions show promise in supporting physical symptom management, evidence regarding their feasibility and potential effects on psychological distress remains limited.

Despite promising developments in eHealth, a critical gap remains in understanding how to design and implement digital self-management interventions that effectively align with users’ needs and the complex context of recovery after treatment in the intensive care unit (ICU).

Hard flaccid syndrome (HFS) is a rare and poorly described andrological condition characterized by a persistent semirigid penis in the flaccid state and frequently accompanied by erectile dysfunction, sensory disturbances, urinary symptoms, and psychosocial distress. Due to the absence of standardized diagnostic and therapeutic guidelines, patients increasingly seek health information from AI-based tools such as ChatGPT. However, the reliability of such tools in rare diseases remains uncertain.

AI-powered digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) are increasingly deployed to support employee mental health, yet evaluations have focused predominantly on pretest-posttest symptom outcomes. The emotional states that unfold within real-world AI-assisted sessions remain largely uncharacterized, limiting understanding of how and when these tools may support users in distress.

Anhedonia is a core, clinically consequential feature of depression, and its motivational and behavioral features may be difficult to observe through self-report alone. Speech is an effortful, dynamic, and socially contingent behavior that may index the motivational disruptions central to anhedonia, but few studies have examined anhedonia specifically using a broad, multimodal set of voice features.