JMIR Formative Research

In Vietnam, an upper-middle-income country, the majority of people living with HIV smoke. Vietnam has established quitline services to support this population, but they remain underused. Text messaging is widely used in Vietnam, and studies in other countries have shown that text messaging interventions can promote smoking cessation. Our goal was to conduct a formative study to inform the development of a text messaging intervention to increase access to quitline services and promote smoking cessation among people living with HIV who smoke in Vietnam.

Digital tools may support early phases of trauma therapy for adolescents, yet little is known about how an app-based stabilization phase functions in routine child and adolescent psychiatry clinics. To our knowledge, no previous study has qualitatively examined a compassion-integrated, app-based stabilization phase delivered before trauma processing within trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) for adolescents.

In 2023, over 117 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, 40% of them children. Refugee children are at higher risk for posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety, while professionals may struggle to address mental health and trauma-related concerns across unfamiliar cultural contexts. The Psychiatry Assisting the Culturally Diverse Community in Creating Healing Ties (PACCT) approach supports culturally responsive care for culturally diverse families, but first-line professionals often lack practical support to apply such an approach in routine care.

Exercise therapy is effective in managing chronic nonspecific neck pain (CNP). Nevertheless, the high burden of CNP continues to place pressure on existing rehabilitation services, especially in remote or resource-constrained settings where continuous and standardized physical therapy may be difficult to access. By combining home-based exercise with remote supervision and movement feedback, AI-enabled telerehabilitation may broaden access to rehabilitation and support the continued management of CNP.

Multiple-choice examinations are widely used in dental and medical education. To reduce the effects of random guessing, several scoring methods incorporating penalty scores have been proposed. However, it remains unclear whether such scoring methods improve the accuracy of pass or fail decisions when pass marks are appropriately calibrated.

TikTok is an important source of mental health information for children, adolescents, and young adults, but the accuracy of psychoeducational content remains uncertain. Misleading information may be particularly consequential for younger users, who may have limited digital and health literacy.

In a pilot randomized trial, face-to-face or telephone motivational interviewing (MI) was more efficacious than a smartphone app after 3 months for increasing 6-minute walk distance (primary outcome) and reducing body weight (secondary outcome) in patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD). Little is known about intervention heterogeneity related to social determinants of health (SDOH).

Addressing loneliness is a public health priority, with increasing interest in technological solutions for older adults. However, evidence on real-world feasibility and acceptability of such technologies remains limited.

In recent years, the availability of digital therapeutic apps in medicine, digital therapeutics (DTx), has significantly increased. To evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of DTx, an increasing number of scientific studies have been conducted in this field. Several authors have pointed out that a standardized approach to DTx evaluation is relevant to improving the comparability of apps in the future. Currently, it is unclear how study authors proceed when selecting outcomes and measurement methods (O&M) for DTx studies.

Young adults in the United States experience high rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB) but low engagement with traditional care, highlighting the need for accessible and scalable digital interventions. Self-guided digital safety planning interventions (SPIs) can expand access to support but introduce important decisions about what content to deliver, when systems should intervene, and how users retain control over system actions. Personalization, defined as system-initiated adaptation, and customization, defined as user-initiated control, may offer complementary approaches to these decisions. However, how they should be coordinated to preserve autonomy and reduce burden during periods of distress remains unclear.

Physical activity (PA) is central to healthy aging, yet interventions targeting older adults often report substantial attrition and variable adherence. Although digital and internet-based exercise programs broaden accessibility and flexibility, their ability to sustain engagement compared with traditional on-site formats remains unclear. Understanding how delivery mode influences attrition and adherence—and why participants persist or withdraw—is essential for designing inclusive and sustainable PA interventions.

Large language models (LLMs) could assist in streamlining health care instrument validation. This is particularly relevant as traditional instrument development is time-intensive and resource-intensive. Currently, there is a significant gap in specifically developed and validated trust instruments for pediatric emergency and surgical contexts. Such tools are key because trust is foundational to the patient family–physician relationship and is associated with improved care-seeking and treatment adherence.