Online Journal of Public Health Informatics

Mobile health (mHealth) represents a modality of teledentistry that has the potential to improve access to dental care. Given that patient reactions to dental procedures can influence both clinician experience and care delivery, assessing patient discomfort when smartphones are used to capture dental images for teledentistry examinations is crucial.

Public opinion, which may be influenced by personal experiences, news, and social media, can impact compliance with public health measures (PHMs) during health emergencies. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools offer opportunities to analyze public opinion in real time during health emergencies. However, their performance in accurately identifying sentiment and themes in health-related online content remains unclear.

Despite widespread COVID-19 vaccination, breakthrough infections remain a public health concern, with transmission risks potentially linked to community behaviors and age-specific preventive practices. While mask-wearing and social distancing are well-established mitigation strategies, their adoption patterns across age groups, particularly among vaccinated individuals, are poorly understood.

Personas, fictional profiles representing user segments, play an important role in human-centered design, ensuring tools are tailored to the needs of users. Although public health organizations often develop information systems to promote population health, human-centered design methods and personas are generally underused in public health informatics projects.

Oral nicotine pouches (ONPs), such as Zyn, have gained popularity among young people; however, their portrayal on social media remains under-studied. Instagram memes, a widely shared form of digital communication, may shape young people’s perceptions about ONPs and contribute to the widespread acceptance of ONP use.

Older adults often access traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines, television, and radio, for health information. However, compared with older adults without frailty, older adults with frailty experience greater declines in physical functions and mental health (including depressive symptoms), as well as social functioning, due to reduced interaction with others, which limits their access to these sources of information.

Mini implants, or temporary anchorage devices, have transformed modern orthodontic practice by offering stable, minimally invasive anchorage for complex tooth movements. Despite their proven effectiveness, their use varies widely across regions, often influenced by clinicians’ knowledge, confidence, and training.

User experience has a significant impact on pharmaceutical drug effectiveness. Social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have become prominent spaces where individuals share their medication-related experiences, especially with widely marketed drugs such as semaglutide. Despite the large volume of conversation, a comprehensive understanding of how various user subpopulations engage with semaglutide-related discussions remains underdeveloped.

For accurate medication usage statistics and medication adherence calculations, we need to have an accurate days’ supply (DS) for each prescription. Unfortunately, often the DS or the information needed for calculating the DS is not provided. Therefore, other methods need to be applied to acquire missing values or substitute incorrect values.

Public health data integration and automation systems are crucial for effective healthcare delivery and public health surveillance. However, the factors associated with hospitals' adoption and successful implementation remain inadequately explored.

COVID-19 forecasting models have been used to inform decision making around resource allocation and intervention decisions e.g., hospital beds or stay-at-home orders. State-of-the-art forecasting models often use multimodal data such as mobility or socio-demographic data to enhance COVID-19 case prediction models. Nevertheless, related work has revealed under-reporting bias in COVID-19 cases as well as sampling bias in mobility data for certain minority racial and ethnic groups, which affects the fairness of the COVID-19 predictions among racial and ethnic groups.

Loneliness is a dynamic phenomenon that can be investigated using social media and web data.