Journal of Medical Internet Research

Obesity is a chronic, multifactorial, and relapsing disease, affecting people of all ages worldwide, and is directly related to multiple complications. Understanding public attitudes and perceptions toward obesity is essential for developing effective health policies, prevention strategies, and treatment approaches.

This paper presents a case study describing the use of social media, specifically Facebook and Instagram, as a valuable tool for recruiting participants in community-engaged health care studies. Drawing on the experiences of our team during a qualitative study aiming to understand the needs of Indigenous fathers and Two-Spirit parents as they transition to parenthood, we offer an in-depth exploration of our social media recruitment strategy. This strategy encompasses deliberate content creation and online engagement with local Indigenous community organizations and people. Through the implementation of this recruitment strategy, we successfully recruited 18 Indigenous fathers and 4 Two-Spirit parents to our community-engaged project. We learned that social media can be used to enhance recruitment by building community trust, engagement, tailored content for specific audiences, and adaptive strategies guided by data metrics provided by social media platforms. Our journey included several challenges, such as dealing with fraudulent participants, navigating budget and resource constraints, and facing recruitment limitations, which we also describe in detail. Our paper provides essential insights for researchers considering the use of social media as a recruitment tool but we are unsure of how to begin. Health care researchers may find our experience and recommendations helpful for developing and implementing their own effective social media recruitment strategy. Meanwhile, sharing our experience contributes to the broader understanding of the role of social media in participant recruitment.

Information and communications technology–based tailored management (TM) intervention is a novel automatic system in which a smartphone app for the management of patients with hypertension and diabetes, the provider web, and Bluetooth devices are linked. However, little evidence exists regarding the cost-effectiveness of the interventions using mobile apps.

The COVID-19 pandemic, patient preference, and economic opportunity are shifting acute care from the hospital to the home, supported by the transformation in remote monitoring technology. Monitoring patients with digital medical devices gives unprecedented insight into their physiology. However, this technology does not exist in a vacuum. Distinguishing pathology from physiological variability, user error, or device limitations is challenging. In a hospital, patients are monitored in a contrived environment. Monitoring at home instead captures activities of daily living alongside patients’ trajectory of disease and recovery. Both settings make for “noisy” data. However, we are familiar with hospital noise, accounting for it in our practice and perceptions of normal. Home monitoring as a diagnostic intervention introduces a new set of downstream consequences, dependent on device, cadence of collection, adherence, duration, alarm thresholds, and escalation criteria. We must accept greater ambiguity and contextualize vital signs. All devices balance accuracy with acceptability, so compromises are inevitable and perfect data should not be expected. Alarms must be specific as well as sensitive, balancing clinical risk with capacity for response. By setting expectations around data from the home, we can smooth the adoption of remote monitoring and accelerate the transition of acute care.

The Zindagi Mehfooz (safe life; ZM) electronic immunization registry (EIR) is a comprehensive suite of digital health interventions that aims to improve equitable access, timeliness, and coverage of child immunizations through a smartphone-based app for vaccinators, web-based dashboards for supervisors and managers, text message alerts and reminders for caregivers, and a call center. It has been implemented at scale in Sindh Province, Pakistan.

With an increasing number of digital health apps available in app stores, it is important to assess these technologies reliably regarding their quality. This is done to mitigate the risks associated with their use. There are many different guidelines, methods, and metrics available to assess digital health apps with regard to their quality.

Although tobacco use has significantly declined in the general population, traditional tobacco use treatment uptake and success rates remain disproportionately low among people who identify as African American/Black, Hispanic/Latina/o, and American Indian/Alaska Native. Technology-based interventions (TBIs) for tobacco use are promising alternatives to traditional tobacco use treatments.

Although online health communities are acknowledged for their role in bridging the supply-demand gap in mental health services, the client decision-making process in these environments remains underexplored.

Menstruation is a physical symptom that occurs in women of reproductive age. It has a significant impact on the daily life and health of women when their academic and social activities are most active. Since many women experience difficulties in daily life because of premenstrual syndrome and dysmenorrhea, it is important to identify, prepare for, and manage the menstrual cycle in advance.

Spaced digital education applies digital tools to deliver educational content via multiple, repeated learning sessions separated by prespecified time intervals. Spaced digital education appears to promote acquisition and long-term retention of knowledge, skills, and change in clinical behavior.

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a technology routinely used in clinical practice to assess blood oxygenation (SpO₂) and pulse rate (PR). Skin pigmentation may influence accuracy, leading to health outcomes disparities.

The historical development and contemporary instances of futures studies, an interdisciplinary field that focuses on exploring and formulating alternative futures, exemplify the increasing significance of using futures methods in shaping the health care domain. Despite the wide array of these methodologies, there have been limited endeavors to employ them within the medical community thus far.