Online Journal of Public Health Informatics

Digital-based health interventions (DHIs), defined as health services delivered electronically, have demonstrated effectiveness in promoting health outcomes. However, DHIs often suffer from low user retention, a challenge attributed to limited attention to socio-cultural determinants and insufficient user engagement strategies. This paper explores participatory animation (PA), a collaborative methodology that engages community partners in co-creating animated content, as a strategy to improve DHI retention and effectiveness. Drawing from existing literature, this viewpoint examines the theoretical foundations and practical affordances of PA for enhancing digital health interventions. We describe PA as a multi-step production process that integrates participant-driven oral and visual design contributions into multimedia outputs for use in DHIs. Here, PA shows promise in producing engaging and culturally resonant content, with potential to improve intervention uptake and sustain user engagement. Despite these affordances, PA remains underutilized in health research. Given the growing urgency to develop effective, equitable DHIs, participatory animation offers a novel, community-informed approach for enhancing both design and implementation. This paper positions PA as a methodological frontier for digital health intervention science.

The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted telehealth adoption among clinical nutritionists globally. However, there is a research gap in Saudi Arabia concerning telehealth's prevalence and effectiveness in dietetics practice.

College years represent a pivotal phase as students transition into adulthood, a period marked by heightened vulnerability to mental health challenges. Beyond the high prevalence of common mental health issues, a large treatment gap (driven by both supply-side and demand-side factors) exacerbates the overall burden. Furthermore, students in higher education frequently experience psychological distress and subthreshold symptoms that impair well-being and daily functioning. Globally, technology-based mental health solutions have emerged as an important strategy to address unmet needs, with a growing evidence base across populations. Research has increasingly focused on examining digital mental health interventions for college students. Against this backdrop, we examine the challenges within India’s large higher education system—which serves approximately 43 million students—and the expanding role of technology in this sector. We explore the potential for leveraging technology-based solutions to enhance student mental health initiatives within higher education institutions, considering relevant policies and guidelines that provide an impetus to these efforts. We reflect upon challenges and opportunities for implementing digital mental health interventions in Indian higher education, and propose strategic actions at institutional and governmental levels. Key considerations include data governance, safety, transparency, positioning of digital initiatives relative to in-person care, safeguards for content quality, provision of interventions at varying intensities, and recommendations for policy, governmental support, and research to optimize the use of technology for student mental health in institutes of higher education in India.

This research letter describes substance use disparities among online, help-seeking, sexual and gender minoritized people in San Francisco. Our findings emphasize the importance of strengthening public health practice by leveraging digital and online methods to reach communities.

Depression and anxiety affect millions worldwide; yet, many people face barriers to timely and effective mental health care, underscoring the need for scalable, high-quality interventions.

Disaster medicine education increasingly emphasizes situational awareness and a proactive disaster mindset as crucial competencies for effective response. Situational awareness involves comprehending the disaster environment to make informed decisions under pressure, while a disaster mindset encompasses psychological resilience and effective functioning amidst chaos. Integrating technologies into simulation training allows experiential learning that bridges these theoretical concepts with practical application.

Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is the most common cause of vaginal discharge in people of childbearing age in the United States. More information about what patients do and do not like about the most common BV products and the extent to which they reduce BV symptoms is important for understanding patients’ health and the current treatment landscape for BV.

With the increasing use of social media, platforms like Twitter (X) have become popular channels for disseminating health information. In Saudi Arabia, Twitter (X) is widely used, making it an effective tool for health awareness. However, the accuracy of nutrition-related content on social media is often questioned.

TikTok became an increasingly popular platform for mental health discussions during a major global stressor (COVID-19 pandemic). On TikTok, content assumed to promote user engagement is delivered in a hyper-individually-curated manner through a proprietary algorithm. Mental health providers have raised concerns about TikTok's potential role in promoting inaccurate self-diagnoses, pathologizing normal behaviors, and fostering new-onset symptoms after exposure to illness-related content, such as tic-like movements linked to Conversion or Factitious Disorders. The accuracy of PTSD-related content with respect to conveying symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment deserves further investigation.

This viewpoint highlights the critical need for proactive and strategic integration of digital health tools into heat-health action plans (HHAPs) across Europe. Drawing insights from the digital health surge during the COVID-19 pandemic and recent heat-related health impacts, we identify response gaps and suggest specific strategies to strengthen current plans. Key recommendations include leveraging mobile health communication, expanding telemedicine usage, adopting wearable health monitoring devices, and utilizing advanced data analytics to improve responsiveness and equity. This perspective aims to guide policymakers, health authorities, and healthcare providers in systematically enhancing heat-health preparedness through digital health innovation.

Tailoring intervention content, such as those designed to improve physical activity (PA) behaviour, can enhance effectiveness. Previous Bayesian network research showed that it might be relevant to tailor PA interventions based on demographic factors such as gender, revealing differences in determinants' roles between subpopulations. In order to optimise tailoring, one needs to understand the differences between subpopulations based on different other characteristics. Building on this, the current study examines age, education level and PA impairment as key moderators, as these factors might influence PA engagement and intervention responsiveness. Older adults, for example, rely more on habitual behaviour, lower-educated individuals may face challenges due to lower health literacy and socio-economic inequalities, and individuals with PA impairment, defined as functional impairments restricting PA, may face unique barriers to PA. Understanding differences based on these factors is crucial for optimising interventions and ensuring effectiveness across diverse populations.

Threats to data integrity have always existed in online human subjects research, but it appears these threats have become more common and more advanced in recent years. Researchers have proposed various techniques to address satisficers, repeat participants, bots, and fraudulent participants, yet no synthesis of this literature has been conducted.