JMIR Formative Research

Japan has one of the highest densities of computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners globally, yet efficient resource allocation remains a challenge amid demographic shifts and regional health care disparities.

The digital mental health (DMH) industry has grown drastically over the last decade; yet, many DMH products have failed to demonstrate meaningful clinical outcomes, in large part due to lack of scientific evidence. This viewpoint paper highlights an example of how early-stage DMH companies can prioritize science as a strategic advantage. We discuss Moment for Parents, an artificial intelligence–driven maternal mental health app built entirely with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. We illustrate the advantages and challenges of building a science-backed product with federal funding. Benefits include credible evidence generation, independence in product development, and enhanced market differentiation. We also discuss the challenges of navigating the SBIR ecosystem, including grant writing and administrative demands, and aligning business objectives with federal research priorities. By showcasing both the promise and complexity of SBIR funding, this viewpoint paper offers actionable insights for founders and chief executive officers who aim to prioritize science in the DMH space.

Speech sound disorders are common in children and are associated with an increased risk of academic reading difficulties. The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the need for remote and digitalized assessment tools. In South Korea, standardized instruments such as the Urimal Test of Articulation and Phonation and Assessment of Phonology and Articulation for children are widely used but have limitations, including reliance on face-to-face evaluation, and the absence of automated scoring.

The aging and caregiving population is becoming increasingly diverse in the United States, leading to a growing need for culturally adapted interventions to address the unique needs of underrepresented groups, such as Asian Americans. However, interventions targeting Asian Americans and exploring cultural adaptation strategies remain limited in dementia caregiving research.

This study examines how medical students and clinicians report experiencing patient medication requests associated with prescription drug direct-to-consumer advertising on social media; survey data from 98 respondents indicate that those providing both in-person and virtual care encounter more frequent requests for medications advertised online, particularly branded glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) weight loss drugs.

Telemedicine has become central to digital health strategies, yet the regulatory environment that shapes ethical safeguards and equitable access remains uneven and incompletely assessed across countries. Legal and normative instruments matter because they define requirements for privacy, consent, accountability, professional readiness, and barrier reduction.

Mobile health (mHealth), and specifically smartphone apps, have grown exponentially in both functionality and accessibility and are becoming an important component of health care. Research exploring the use of mHealth for managing or treating chronic diseases, such as cancer, has shown promising effects. Yet, comparatively little work has examined how such technologies can enhance exercise interventions for young people with cancer. To optimize the effectiveness of mHealth in these contexts, it is essential to build a stronger evidence base on user experience.

Formative evaluation is widely used in implementation science to anticipate barriers and facilitators prior to the deployment of health technologies, typically relying on stakeholders’ reported beliefs collected before real-world exposure. This approach has proven informative for many digital health tools; however, its application to immersive and embodied technologies such as extended reality (XR) warrants closer scrutiny. Most XR interventions in health care are delivered through head-mounted displays, which depend on spatial perception and sensorimotor engagement. Several implementation-relevant properties, including comfort, perceived intrusiveness, safety, and workflow disruption, often become apparent only through direct interaction. At the same time, large segments of the health care workforce remain XR-naive, such that preuse judgments are frequently shaped by anticipation rather than experience. Drawing on concepts from implementation science, grounded cognition, and human-computer interaction, this Viewpoint examines a plausible interpretive problem in XR adoption and argues that perception-based formative evaluation, when applied through frameworks developed for screen-based technologies, may misclassify barriers and facilitators. Rather than questioning formative evaluation as a methodological approach, we identify a boundary condition for its interpretability in experience-dependent technologies and propose a pragmatic refinement: incorporating brief experiential familiarization before eliciting stakeholder perceptions to strengthen early-stage assessment and improve alignment with real-world implementation decisions.

Clinicians are the interface between artificial intelligence (AI) applications and patient care. To maximize benefits and minimize risks of AI, clinicians must be “AI-ready”—that is, willing and able to understand, evaluate, and appropriately use AI tools in practice. Prior literature suggests that clinicians lack fundamental competencies in the use of AI. These gaps could be especially problematic in primary care, given its broad reach into patient care. We surveyed primary care providers (PCPs) in the United States’ largest integrated health care system, relatively early in its widespread implementation of clinical AI for frontline use, in order to identify readiness gaps that may warrant particular attention as part of a comprehensive AI implementation strategy.

The original counterclockwise study carried out in the late 1970s provided an extreme example of “reminiscence therapy,” reporting improvements in older adults’ cognitive and physical functioning after they had lived for 5 days in a house set up as if decades earlier (the 1950s). We tested a virtual reality (VR) analog of this approach, enhanced by embodying participants in a virtual body that looked like themselves at the corresponding younger age.

Plantar pressure imaging is a stable modality that reflects gait-related biomechanical characteristics and has been used increasingly for gait assessment and recognition. However, plantar pressure images are high dimensional and nonlinear, making manual feature engineering and conventional machine learning insufficient to capture discriminative patterns.

If a patient with cancer is identified as having a pathogenic variant, at-risk relatives are eligible for genetic testing, known as cascade testing. However, in the United States, the patient is responsible for informing their family members, and only about 30% of these family members are ultimately informed and complete testing. There is a need to train patients with cancer to communicate risk information and motivate their family members to obtain genetic testing.