JMIR Human Factors

Loneliness among older adults has become a major public health concern associated with cognitive decline, depression, and increased health care use. The advancement of digital health technologies such as wearable devices, smart home systems, and mobile health apps provides new opportunities to monitor and mitigate loneliness through continuous physiological and behavioral assessment. However, the effectiveness of such technologies largely depends on user interface design, ensuring that older adults can understand, trust, and comfortably engage with the technology. Existing research on interactive platforms and user interfaces for psychological and emotional monitoring has mainly focused on usability testing and technology feasibility, with limited attention to structured design frameworks that integrate psychological, emotional, and accessibility dimensions for older adults. Furthermore, most studies rely on qualitative assessments and lack quantitative prioritization of design indicators.

Providing tailored information is an essential part of health care. However, physicians often lack time for detailed education during the consultation. An additional, tailored digital health information service (DHIS) could help physicians meet their patients’ information needs regardless of time and place and extend physician-patient communication to the digital realm.

Pulse palpation is essential for accurate traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis. However, this tactile-sensory-dependent technique is not feasible in teleconference, leaving traditional Chinese medicine underserved by conventional tele-practice frameworks. To address this, we developed an Assistive Pulse Data Collection (APDC; Logistics and Supply Chain MultiTech R&D Centre) device.

Mammograms are the most readily used procedures for early breast cancer detection but are notorious for the discomfort they induce in patients. This physiological strain has been validated by many questionnaire-based investigations, some of which indicate that it may discourage and deter women from potentially lifesaving health care. While informative, these subjective measures are highly variable and do not provide an objective perspective regarding the coordinated physiological and ergonomic response required for the procedure.

Instructional documents are crucial for safely operating medical devices. However, few studies have explicitly considered designing instructions for health care professionals (HCPs). Psychological research suggests that advanced learners with prior expertise in a domain are better able to generalize their existing knowledge to new areas compared to those with little prior expertise, resulting in different informational needs.

Recruiting patients in primary care research remains challenging due to clinical workload, staffing constraints, and the need to limit disruption to routine care. Traditional recruitment methods often place a substantial burden on clinics, prompting research teams to adopt low-burden and scalable approaches such as email-based recruitment. Despite its growing use, limited empirical evidence describes how email recruitment campaigns are designed and how they perform when targeting primary care patients in real-world settings.

Concurrent mixed mode designs for data collection may introduce mode-specific biases. This study investigated mode effects between computer-assisted website interviewing (CAWI) and computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) in the concurrent mixed mode study CoVerlauf.

Video consultations (VCs) are effective and beneficial, yet their use is being discontinued, and there is a preference for face-to-face consultations.

Digital health services (DHS) are an increasingly integral part of health care services. Understanding users’ abilities to engage with DHS is crucial to ensuring that health technology meets their needs. Assessing digital health literacy (DHL) and health technology readiness can help identify the strengths and weaknesses of DHL in different subgroups.

Lived experience stories are often used on formal help sites as a support resource for individuals who self-harm. While self-harm–related internet use provides an alternative for individuals who are not yet ready or are unwilling or unable to access support offline, it has also been shown to unintentionally reinforce self-harm behavior. There are several components that might influence whether a lived experience story is perceived as helpful, unhelpful, or potentially harmful, and the evidence supporting that these encourage help-seeking in the reader is limited.

Surgical telementoring enables a remote expert surgeon (mentor) to guide an operating surgeon (mentee) during surgery and facilitates the transfer of surgical skills. However, commonly used audio and static visual cues are inadequate to demonstrate complex tool-tissue interactions. To overcome this limitation, dynamic augmented reality (AR)–based visual cues are overlayed on the operative field to demonstrate precise instrument movements.

Tobacco smoking is viewed as a behavioral risk factor for psoriasis initiation and progress, even among those undergoing biologic treatment. However, evidence regarding the association between tobacco smoking and treatment response to biologics among patients with psoriasis is limited.