Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a common neurodevelopmental disorder presenting to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in Ireland, where variability in assessment, monitoring, and follow-up persists despite established standards of care. The ADMiRE clinical pathway was developed to improve consistency in care delivery, but its paper-based format limited scalability and increased administrative burden. This perspective describes the development of a digital platform to operationalise the ADMiRE pathway in routine clinical practice. The system was developed through an iterative, stakeholder-informed process involving clinicians and service stakeholders. The platform includes structured referral management, standardised diagnostic and monitoring tools with automated scoring, medication and case management, longitudinal monitoring, and automated clinical documentation. These features aim to support more consistent, guideline-informed care and reduce administrative burden while improving continuity across services. The experience highlights opportunities and challenges in translating structured clinical pathways into scalable digital systems within CAMHS.

Healthy aging plays a crucial role in a country’s economic growth. However, older adults face health challenges, resulting in financial pressure on a country’s healthcare systems, a situation worsened during the pandemic. Amidst these challenges, digital health, such as telehealth, mHealth, and eHealth, emerged to address limited healthcare resources during and following COVID-19. This paper critically analyzes the current landscape of digital health for later life in Canada and the initiatives promoting it. A critical narrative review of 38 sources, including peer-reviewed studies, policy documents, and grey literature, was conducted. Thematic analysis identified four domains: access and utilization, structural barriers, digital ageism, and policy responses. Digital health expanded access and continuity of care, but significant inequities persist, including limited digital literacy, affordability constraints, and uneven infrastructure. Digital ageism operates across individual, institutional, and technological levels. Addressing these challenges requires equity-centred policies, inclusive design, and system-level interventions to support healthy aging.

Digital innovations, primarily enabled by mobile network access, are emerging as valuable tools for reducing the large mental health treatment gap in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Digital mental health tools are being introduced in West Africa, where strong links between mental health and spiritual practice lead many people to seek care from traditional/faith healers. The intersection of technology and traditional healing may offer a new path for providing care in under-resourced communities but requires adaptation and cultural sensitivity. We explored the views and perceptions of faith healers who used a digital mental health application called M-Healer while caring for people with serious mental illness (SMI) over an 8-week trial period. The M-Healer app teaches basic psychosocial skills to help improve the quality of care and reduce the risk of human rights violations via check-in, patient tracking, video and audio features. This case study draws on a series of semi-structured interviews and design workshops conducted with faith healers at three prayer camps in the Eastern Region of Ghana, from November 2019 to August 2023. Inductive thematic analysis of transcripts yielded two primary themes: (1) opportunities for supporting care at the intersection of technology, spiritual practice and mental health treatment, and (2) tensions regarding the adaptation, adoption and integration of technology in this context. This case study highlights the importance of collaborative design, iterative feedback and spiritual framing when developing a digital tool for use in a low-resource faith-healing setting.

Human parasitic gastrointestinal infections affect over 3.5 billion people worldwide, yet their diagnostic management remains heavily dependent on conventional microscopy. While artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a valuable tool in digital parasitology, its application has progressed unevenly across different parasite classes. This systematic review evaluates AI-based diagnostic methods for human gastrointestinal parasites, systematically comparing performance between helminth detection and protozoan identification. From 4323 identified records, 77 studies met our inclusion criteria after rigorous application of exclusion criteria. Of these, 42 studies (54.5%) focused on helminth detection, 28 studies (36.4%) focused on gastrointestinal protozoa and 7 studies (9.1%) evaluated algorithms applicable to both parasite classes. Convolutional neural networks dominated the field (66.2% of studies), with You Only Look Once variants representing the most common object detection architecture (27.3%). For helminth detection, reported sensitivities ranged from 85% to 98% in externally validated studies, with several systems demonstrating superior sensitivity compared to expert microscopists. For protozoan detection, although internal validation frequently reported accuracies exceeding 90%, only 17.9% of studies performed external validation, which revealed substantial performance degradation of 15–30 percentage points. AI demonstrates promising performance in controlled settings, yet it remains limited by a lack of external validation. Notably, 71.4% of the datasets were sourced from a single institution, restricting the scope of generalizability claims. Closing this diagnostic gap requires coordinated efforts to establish standardized imaging protocols, create diverse open-access repositories and adapt advanced machine learning techniques from adjacent fields such as digital pathology.

Digitalization and data-driven research are widely recognized as key drivers of innovation in healthcare, with the potential to improve clinical outcomes, accelerate research, and support evidence-based policymaking. Nevertheless, across jurisdictions, obstacles such as fragmented data governance, limited interoperability, and tensions between data protection and data reuse continue to hinder the effective use of health data. The Regulation on the European Health Data Space (Regulation (EU) 2025/327) represents a significant shift in EU health data governance. It seeks to create a single European market for health data by introducing harmonized rules, shared technical standards, and new institutional structures, while simultaneously reinforcing patients’ rights, access to their data, and control over its use. This paper aims to provide a clear and systematic account of the Regulation for a broad international and interdisciplinary audience. It situates the legal piece within its broader political and legal context, highlighting the factors that shaped its design and providing a comprehensive analysis of its core concepts. Using the patient opt-out regime as a case study, the paper critically examines the enduring tensions between safeguarding fundamental rights, ensuring patient autonomy, and fostering innovation and economic objectives, all while accommodating national preferences.

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act introduces a novel regulatory category of “unacceptable risk,” prohibiting specific AI practices that are deemed fundamentally incompatible with human rights and ethical principles. While much attention has focused on the regulation of high-risk AI systems, particularly in medical contexts, the AI Act’s outright bans under Article 5 have received far less scrutiny. This paper addresses that gap by examining how these prohibitions apply to healthcare and public health, which are domains defined by rapid technological uptake, structural vulnerability, and ethically sensitive decision-making. Drawing on the European Commission’s 2025 interpretative Guidelines, the paper argues that several health-related AI applications, such as emotion recognition tools, biometric categorisation systems, and technologies that influence or target vulnerable populations, may fall within the scope of the bans. It also shows that the Act’s medical and safety exceptions risk weakening the vulnerability protections that the prohibitions aim to secure. By integrating legal analysis with real-world health examples, the paper offers a framework for interpreting these prohibitions and assesses how they should guide the ethical boundaries of AI in healthcare, within and beyond the European context.

Telemental health, including telepsychiatry, has become a core component of Qatar’s mental healthcare system, enabling remote psychiatric assessment, therapy and follow-up care. Its rapid adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated timely intervention, reduced out-patient no-show rates and improved access across populations. Services have expanded to include allied digital interventions such as tele-occupational and tele-speech therapy, delivered within a hybrid care model. Operating within a national telemedicine framework, telemental health in Qatar demonstrates feasibility and sustained utility beyond the pandemic. Continued development will require investment in infrastructure, clinician training and telepsychiatry-specific policies to ensure safe, effective and equitable care.

Older refugees often navigate complex health care needs while aging in resettlement contexts. For Syrian refugees in the Greater Toronto Area and surrounding regions, barriers within the Canadian health care system may shape how care is accessed, coordinated, and supplemented through transnational practices. This study examines how older Syrian refugees aging in the Greater Toronto Area and surrounding regions navigate health care and construct hybrid health care pathways across local and transnational contexts. A qualitative interpretive descriptive design was used. In-depth interviews were conducted with 20 Syrian refugees aged 55–63. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify patterns in participants’ experiences of accessing, coordinating, and supplementing health care. Participants described persistent linguistic barriers, long wait times, and limited access to culturally aligned services within the Canadian health care system. In response, they developed hybrid health care pathways that combined Canadian health care with transnational practices, including consultations with clinicians abroad, cross-border medication use, family support, traditional remedies, and digital technologies. Digital tools played a central role in bridging language and geographic gaps and supporting care coordination. While these hybrid pathways enhanced autonomy, continuity of care, and perceived control, they also introduced risks related to medication safety, fragmented care, informal decision-making, and digital inequities. The findings show that older Syrian refugees’ health care navigation extends beyond formal Canadian health services and is shaped by transnational relationships, cultural knowledge, digital access, and prior health system experiences. Hybrid health care pathways can support continuity and culturally meaningful care, but they also require careful attention to safety, communication, and equity. Health systems should develop culturally responsive and digitally inclusive models that recognize transnational care practices while supporting safer integration with local care.

Access to evidence-based psychosocial interventions for adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) remains limited, despite strong patient demand for nonpharmacological options such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Digital interventions may offer a scalable, low-threshold solution to meet this need and complement existing care. This pragmatic randomized controlled trial evaluated the effectiveness of attexis, a fully self-guided digital intervention based on CBT and mindfulness principles, as an adjunct to treatment as usual (TAU). A total of 337 adults with confirmed ADHD were randomized to either attexis + TAU or TAU alone. The primary outcome was ADHD symptom severity (Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale total score) at 3 months post-randomization (T1). Secondary outcomes included functional impairment, depressive symptoms, self-esteem, and health-related quality of life. Follow-up was conducted at 6 months (T2). Intent-to-treat analyses showed significantly lower ADHD symptom severity in the intervention group at T1 (baseline-adjusted mean difference = −5.0 points; d = 0.85, p < .001). Significant improvements were also observed across all secondary outcomes, and effects remained stable at T2. Responder analyses confirmed the clinical relevance of the findings. Subgroup analyses demonstrated consistent effects across sex, medication use, psychotherapy status, and treatment changes. No adverse events related to attexis were reported. attexis was effective in reducing ADHD symptoms and improving a broad range of functional and psychosocial outcomes. As a safe, low-threshold, fully self-guided intervention, it may serve as a valuable adjunct to routine care and help address existing gaps in access to psychosocial treatment for adults with ADHD.

In recent years, utilizing technologies, such as virtual reality in mental healthcare and treatment, has developed significantly. This study aimed to investigate the effect of using virtual reality (VR) technology on controlling anxiety and reducing fear of heights (acrophobia). This study was a randomized controlled trial conducted in Birjand, Iran, in 2020. 120 participants were recruited and randomly allocated into two groups: intervention and control. The intervention group underwent a single simulated exposure to height using a virtual reality headset. The Beck Anxiety Inventory, alongside a researcher-developed questionnaire were administered as pre-tests to assess acrophobia. Data analysis was performed using SPSS version 23, with significance level at 0.05. The intervention group showed significantly reduced anxiety and acrophobia scores immediately and 1 month after exposure (P < 0.05). Post-exposure, both anxiety and acrophobia scores were significantly lower in the intervention group compared to the control group (P = 0.03 and P < 0.001, respectively), with no significant differences between groups before exposure or 1 month later (P > 0.05). The study concluded that VR technology is an effective tool for reducing anxiety and acrophobia. This approach appears to hold significant promise as a therapeutic modality for psychiatrists treating patients with acrophobia.

Digital technologies provide a convenient and scalable approach to dietary assessment and personalised feedback, facilitating behaviour change. This is essential for reducing the prevalence of non-communicable diseases at a population level. However, the evaluation of the acceptability and feasibility of dietary feedback delivered via online platforms has not been thoroughly investigated. By utilising the term ‘system architecture’ to describe the essential components of the digital approach to capturing dietary feedback, this systematic review outlines the platform, dietary assessment methodology, reference values for assessing dietary intake and elements of personalised dietary feedback. When reported, the acceptability and feasibility of personalised feedback were captured. OVID Medline, OVID Embase, Scopus via Elsevier and Cinahl Plus via EBSCO identified 5839 studies. Search terms included dietary assessment, feedback and digital technologies. In total, twenty-eight studies involving 301 271 participants were included. Food frequency questionnaires were the most commonly used dietary assessment method, accessed via web-based platforms. Dietary intake was commonly assessed using a diet quality index, and feedback was provided on food groups, often combined with a diet quality score or macronutrient analysis. While participant acceptance of personalised dietary feedback was generally high, the overall completion rates for acceptability questionnaires were low, and feasibility was seldom reported. Methods used to measure acceptability and feasibility varied, preventing comparisons across studies. Study quality was high; however, future research would benefit from the involvement of stakeholders and end-users in designing feedback messages.