Journal of Medical Internet Research

Health care professionals (HCPs) routinely have questions concerning the medications they are recommending. There are numerous resources available; however, each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Evidence on technology-based psychological interventions (TBIs) for the acute treatment of depression is rapidly growing. Despite extensive research in this field, there is a lack of research determining effectiveness and acceptance of TBIs considering different application formats in people with a formally diagnosed depressive disorder.

In recent years, robots have been considered a new tech industry that can be used to solve the shortage in human resources in the field of health care. Also, animal-assisted therapy has been used to provide assistance, companionship, and interaction among the elderly and has been shown to have a positive impact on their emotional and psychological well-being. Both pets and robots can provide dynamic communication and positive interaction patterns. However, preferences for middle-aged and older adults in this regard are not clear.

Telemedicine has become a necessary component of clinical practice for the purpose of providing safer patient care during lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been used to support the health care needs of patients with COVID-19 and routine primary care patients alike. However, this change has not been fully consolidated.

The data retrieved with the online search engine, Google Trends, can summarize internet inquiries into specified search terms. This engine may be used for analyzing inquiry peaks for different medical conditions and symptoms.

In epidemiological studies, finding the best subset of factors is challenging when the number of explanatory variables is large.

The digital health care community has been urged to enhance engagement and clinical outcomes by analyzing multidimensional digital phenotypes.

Sepsis is the leading cause of death in US hospitals. Compliance with bundled care, specifically serial lactates, blood cultures, and antibiotics, improves outcomes but is often delayed or missed altogether in a busy practice environment.

In many countries, sex work is criminalized, driving sex work underground and leaving sex workers vulnerable to a number of occupational health and safety risks, including violence, assault, and robbery. With the advent of widely accessible information and communication technologies (ICTs), sex workers have begun to use electronic occupational health and safety tools to mitigate these risks.

When studied in community-based samples, the association of physical activity with blood pressure (BP) remains controversial and is perhaps dependent on the intensity of physical activity. Prior studies have not explored the association of smartwatch-measured physical activity with home BP.

There is significant opportunity to improve the nutritional quality of foods packed in children’s school lunchboxes. Interventions that are effective and scalable targeting the school and home environment are therefore warranted.

Knowledge of how to design digital systems that are ergonomically sound, high in usability, and optimized for the user, context, and task has existed for some time. Despite this, there are still too many examples of new digital health care systems that are poorly designed and that could negatively affect both the work environment of health care staff and patient safety. This could be because of a gap between the theoretical knowledge of design and ergonomics and the practical implementation of this knowledge in procuring and developing digital health care systems. Furthermore, discussions of digitalization are often at a general level and risk neglecting the nature of direct interaction with the digital system. This is problematic since it is at this detailed level that work environment and patient safety issues materialize in practice. In this paper, we illustrate such issues with two scenarios concerned with contemporary electronic health care records, based on field studies in two health care settings. We argue that current methods and tools for designing and evaluating digital systems in health care must cater both to the holistic level and to the details of interaction and ergonomics. It must also be acknowledged that health care professionals are neither designers nor engineers, so expectations of them during the development of digital systems must be realistic. We suggest three paths toward a more sustainable digital work environment in health care: (1) better tools for evaluating the digital work environment in the field; (2) generic formulations of qualitative requirements related to usability and for adaptation to the user, context, and task, to be used in procurement; and (3) the introduction of digital ergonomics as an embracing concept capturing several of the ergonomic challenges (including physical, cognitive, and organizational aspects) involved in implementing and using digital systems.