JMIR mHealth and uHealth

Technological advances allow for recording and sharing health-related data in a patient-centric way using smartphones and wearables. Secure sharing of such patient-generated data with physicians would enable close management of individual health trajectories, monitoring of risk factors, and asynchronous feedback. However, most remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems currently available are not fully integrated into hospital IT systems or lack a patient-centric design.

Maternal mortality remains a persistent challenge in low- and middle-income countries, where evidence-based interventions of obstetric triage and prehospital communication remain sparse. There is limited implementation evidence for technology-based approaches to improve obstetric care in such contexts. Liberia struggles with maternal mortality, particularly in rural areas where deaths are attributable to delays from absent triage and interfacility communication. We implemented a Mobile Obstetric Referral Emergency System (MORES) in rural Bong County to improve prehospital transfer, health worker attentiveness, and patient care for critical obstetric patients. MORES consisted of triage training and a 2-way, templated WhatsApp communication system to reduce delays among patients transferred from rural health facilities (RHF) to hospitals.

No preview text available.

Consumer-based wearables are becoming more popular and provide opportunities to track individual’s clinical parameters remotely. However, literature about their criterion and known groups validity is scarce.

ViSi Mobile has the capability of monitoring a patient’s posture continuously during hospitalization. Analysis of ViSi telemetry data enables researchers and healthcare providers to quantify an individual patient’s movement and investigate collective patterns of many patients. However, erroneous values can exist in routinely collected ViSi telemetry data. Data must be scrutinized to remove erroneous records before statistical analysis.

Personal safety is a widespread public health issue that affects people of all demographics. There is a growing interest in the use of mobile apps for enhancing personal safety, particularly for children and youth at risk, who are among the most vulnerable groups in society.

As the most malignant type of cancer in the female reproductive system, ovarian cancer (OC) has become the second leading cause of death among Chinese women. Chemotherapy is the main treatment for OC patients, and its numerous adverse effects can easily lead to malnutrition. It is difficult to centrally manage OC patients in the intervals between chemotherapy. The utility of WeChat, an effective mobile tool, in chronic disease management has been highlighted.

Pulmonary hypertension (PH), is a chronic and complex condition, requiring consistent management and education. The widespread use of smartphones has opened possibilities for mobile health apps to support both patients and healthcare professionals in monitoring and managing PH more effectively.

The use of wearable sensors is being explored as a challenging way to accurately identify smoking behaviors by measuring physiological and environmental factors in real-life settings. Although they hold potential benefits for aiding smoking cessation, no single wearable device currently achieves high accuracy in detecting smoking events. Furthermore, it is crucial to emphasize that this area of study is dynamic and requires ongoing updates.

Despite the growing availability of smoking cessation apps, low engagement and cessation rates have remained a significant challenge. To address this issue, we used a user-centered design to iteratively develop a mobile app (MO) to provide comprehensive, tailored, and evidence-based content to support smokers in their quitting journey.

Obesity is a rapidly increasing health problem in China, causing massive economic and health losses annually. Many techniques have emerged to help people with obesity better adhere to intervention programs and achieve their weight loss goals, including food replacement and internet-delivered weight loss consultations. Most studies on weight loss interventions mainly focused on the change in body weight or body mass index; however, body fat, especially visceral fat mass, is considered the main pathogenic factor in obesity. In China, more reliable evidence is required on this topic. Moreover, it is unclear whether an integrated weight loss program combining food replacement products, mobile app-based platforms, and daily body composition monitoring using a wireless scale is useful and practical in China.

Effective management of non-communicable diseases requires ongoing coordination and monitoring, often facilitated by e-health technologies such as mobile health (mHealth) applications. The end-user Mobile Application Rating Scale (uMARS) is a valuable tool for assessing the quality of mHealth apps from a user perspective. However, the lack of a French version limits its use in French-speaking countries, where mHealth app evaluation and regulation remain insufficiently addressed although the growing number of applications and high interest in their role in healthcare.