Scope

Human Factors and Digital Health focuses on interdisciplinary scholarship that considers the design and deployment of health technologies with special consideration of the interaction between the health technologies and their users, including patients, providers, payers, and other stakeholders. Human factors reference human emotions, behaviors, and cognitions related to the design, adoption, usage, and implementation of health technologies. A key to scholarship in this area is the appreciation that the success of digital health stems from consideration of these human factors at all stages of the life cycle – development, deployment, and adaptation. This would include participatory approaches to development, workflow considerations for providers and patients, and evaluation studies that expand beyond clinical endpoints to consider outcomes related to human factors. Evaluation studies conducted in real-world settings that consider impacts on various stakeholder groups are also relevant.

Areas covered by Human Factors and Digital health include, but are not limited to:

·       Usability studies of digital health interventions

·       User-centered design of digital health interventions

·       Evaluation of health technologies focused on human factor outcomes addressing usability, usefulness, or clinical utility

·       Real-world deployments of eHealth, mHealth, pHealth, and uHealth

·       User perspectives on (patients, providers, payers) on human factor elements of digital health interventions

·       Participatory approaches to design and research

·       Considerations of negative or unattended consequences of digital health interventions addressing human factor concerns

·       Evaluations of eHealth and mHealth interventions conducted in real-world settings and with various stakeholders

·       Implementation studies of eHealth and mHealth interventions

All studies must contribute insights to digital health with special emphasis on papers that combine theories, frameworks, and methods from both technology and health related fields. Papers that are focused more on issues of health data are more appropriate for Frontiers in Health Informatics. Human Factors and Digital Health will consider formative work that considers human factors in the development of health technologies and summative work that considers human factors in the evaluation of health technologies.

Submission

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