JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting

Young people and families endure protracted waits for specialist mental health support in the UK. Staff shortages and limited resources have led many organizations to develop digital platforms to improve access to support. myHealthE is a digital platform used by families referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in South London. It was initially designed to improve the collection of routine outcome measures and subsequently the ‘virtual waiting room’ module was added which includes information about child and adolescent mental health as well as signposting to supportive services. However, little is known about the acceptability or use of digital resources, such as myHealthE, or about sociodemographic inequalities affecting access to these resources.

In today’s digital society, the acquisition of parenting information through online platforms such as social networking sites (SNSs) has become widespread. Amid the mix of online and offline information sources, there is a need to discover effective information-seeking methods for solving parenting problems.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine has been widely integrated into primary care pediatrics. While initial studies showed some concern for disparities in telemedicine use, telemedicine uptake for pediatric patients in a low-income, primarily Latino community over a sustained period has yet to be described.

The increasing need for child care is placing a burden on parents, including those with autistic children.

There is a lack of studies examining the long-term outcomes of internet-based parent training programs implemented in clinical settings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Preventive interventions are needed to provide targeted health support to adolescents to improve health behaviours. Engaging adolescents in preventive interventions remains a challenge, highlighting the need for innovative recruitment strategies. Given adolescents’ lives are intertwined with digital technologies, attention should be focused on these avenues for recruitment. The evolving nature of clinical trials, including the emergence of virtual clinical trials, require new recruitment approaches, which must be evaluated.

Asynchronous communication via electronic modes (e-communication), including patient portals, secure messaging services, text messaging, and e-mail, is increasingly used to supplement synchronous face-to-face medical visits; however, little is known about its quality in pediatric settings.

While the benefits of fathers’ engagement in pregnancy are well researched, little is known about first-time expectant fathers’ information-seeking practices in Southeast Asia regarding pregnancy. In addition, there is a notable gap in understanding their information-sharing behaviors during the pregnancy journey. This information is important, as cultural norms are prevalent in Southeast Asia, and this might influence their information-sharing behavior, particularly about pregnancy.

Ocular following responses (OFRs), small amplitude short-latency reflexive eye movements, have been used to study visual motion processing, with potential diagnostic applications. However, they are difficult to record with commercial video-based eye trackers, especially in children.

Rising childhood obesity rates in Asia are adding risk for the future adult burden of obesity and noncommunicable diseases. Weak policies across most Asian countries enable unrestricted marketing of obesogenic foods and beverages to children. Television is the common medium for food marketing to reach this audience.

Pain assessment in the infant population is challenging owing to their inability to verbalize and hence self-report pain. Currently, there is a paucity of data on how parents identify and manage this pain at home using standardized pain assessment tools.

Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions of newborns are emotional and stressful for parents, influencing their mental and physical wellbeing and resulting in high rates of psychological morbidities. Significant research has been undertaken to understand and quantify the burden of a newborn’s medical journey on parents’ wellbeing. Simultaneously, an increase is observed in the development and implementation of telemedicine interventions, defined as remote delivery of health care. Telemedicine is used as an overarching term for different technological interventions grouped as real-time audio-visual communication, remote patient monitoring, and asynchronous communication. Various telemedicine interventions have been proposed and developed, but scarcely with the primary goal of improving the parental wellbeing during their newborn’s medical journey.