Journal of Medical Internet Research

There is a pressing need for digital tools that can leverage big data to help clinicians select effective antibiotic treatments in the absence of timely susceptibility data. Clinical presentation and local epidemiology can inform therapy selection to balance the risk of antimicrobial resistance and patient risk. However, data and clinical expertise must be appropriately integrated into clinical workflows.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent “infodemic” increased concerns about Twitter’s role in advancing antivaccination messages, even before a vaccine became available to the public. New computational methods allow for analysis of cross-platform use by tracking links to websites shared over Twitter, which, in turn, can uncover some of the content and dynamics of information sources and agenda-setting processes. Such understanding can advance theory and efforts to reduce misinformation.

Many weight loss programs show short-term effectiveness, but subsequent weight loss maintenance is difficult to achieve. Digital technologies offer a promising means of delivering behavior change approaches at low costs and on a wide scale. The Navigating to a Healthy Weight (NoHoW) project, which was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, aimed to develop, test, and evaluate a digital toolkit designed to promote successful long-term weight management. The toolkit was tested in an 18-month, large-scale, international, 2×2 factorial (motivation and self-regulation vs emotion regulation) randomized controlled trial that was conducted on adults with overweight or obesity who lost ≥5% of their body weight in the preceding 12 months before enrollment into the intervention.

In digital medicine, patient data typically record health events over time (eg, through electronic health records, wearables, or other sensing technologies) and thus form unique patient trajectories. Patient trajectories are highly predictive of the future course of diseases and therefore facilitate effective care. However, digital medicine often uses only limited patient data, consisting of health events from only a single or small number of time points while ignoring additional information encoded in patient trajectories. To analyze such rich longitudinal data, new artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are needed. In this paper, we provide an overview of the recent efforts to develop trajectory-aware AI solutions and provide suggestions for future directions. Specifically, we examine the implications for developing disease models from patient trajectories along the typical workflow in AI: problem definition, data processing, modeling, evaluation, and interpretation. We conclude with a discussion of how such AI solutions will allow the field to build robust models for personalized risk scoring, subtyping, and disease pathway discovery.

Goal-oriented care is being adopted to deliver person-centered primary care to older adults with multimorbidity and complex care needs. Although this model holds promise, its implementation remains a challenge. Digital health solutions may enable processes to improve adoption; however, they require evaluation to determine feasibility and impact.

Current treatments for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) often yield suboptimal outcomes, partly because of insufficient targeting of underlying psychological mechanisms (eg, avoidance reinforcement learning). Mindfulness training (MT) has shown efficacy for anxiety; yet, widespread adoption has been limited, partly because of the difficulty in scaling in-person–based delivery. Digital therapeutics are emerging as potentially viable treatments; however, very few have been empirically validated.

The internet is one of the most popular health information resources, and the Chinese constitute one-fifth of the online users worldwide. As internet penetration continues to rise, more details on the Chinese population seeking online health information need to be known based on the current literature.

Across eHealth intervention studies involving children, adolescents, and their parents, researchers have measured user experience to assist with intervention development, refinement, and evaluation. To date, no widely accepted definitions or measures of user experience exist to support a standardized approach for evaluation and comparison within or across interventions.

The COVID-19 pandemic restricted everyday life during 2020-2021 for many people worldwide. It also affected alcohol consumption patterns and leisure activities, including the use of social media.

Care policies emphasize deinstitutionalization and aging in place in response to demographic changes. Different eHealth technologies are one way to achieve this aim. However, there is a need to better understand older adults’ needs for eHealth services, and thus, these health solutions require further exploration.

The National Cancer Institute Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program provides a series of funding mechanisms to create an ecosystem of open-source software (OSS) that serves the needs of cancer research. As the ITCR ecosystem substantially grows, it faces the challenge of the long-term sustainability of the software being developed by ITCR grantees. To address this challenge, the ITCR sustainability and industry partnership working group (SIP-WG) was convened in 2019.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly boosted the implementation of digital services worldwide, it has become increasingly important to understand how these solutions are integrated into professionals’ routine work. Professionals who are using the services are key influencers in the success of implementations. To ensure successful implementations, it is important to understand the multiprofessional perspective, especially because implementations are likely to increase even more.