Decision support beyond symptom diaries for gut–brain disorders: portable assessment, bias validation, implementation workflows

Disorders of gut–brain interaction (DGBI) are common, heterogeneous, and often managed over long time horizons. While symptom diaries remain widely used, they can be burdensome, inconsistent, and vulnerable to recall effects and reporting bias. At the same time, clinical care is seeing rapid growth in portable and remote assessment tools—such as smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA), wearable physiologic sensors, home-based testing, digital therapeutics, and algorithm-supported triage. Yet key gaps persist: how to validate these tools against meaningful clinical outcomes, how to quantify and mitigate bias across patient groups, and how to implement decision support in workflows that are practical for gastroenterology clinics.



This Research Topic will showcase therapeutic decision-support approaches that extend beyond traditional symptom recording for DGBI (e.g., IBS, functional dyspepsia, functional constipation, rumination syndrome, and centrally mediated abdominal pain syndrome). We welcome work that bridges measurement science, clinical trials, and implementation, with emphasis on tools that guide treatment selection, monitoring, and step-up/step-down care—without increasing clinician burden.



We encourage submissions including (but not limited to): development and validation of portable assessment methods (EMA, passive sensing, digital biomarkers, remote patient monitoring); bias and fairness evaluation of patient-reported outcomes and algorithms; methods to detect placebo/nocebo effects and expectation-related confounding; integration of decision support into care pathways (referral criteria, treat-to-target frameworks, shared decision-making); pragmatic trials and real-world evidence on feasibility and effectiveness; interoperability and data standards; privacy and ethics; and implementation workflows for multidisciplinary care (dietitians, psychology, pelvic floor therapy, pharmacy).



By bringing together clinicians, researchers, and digital health experts, this Topic aims to accelerate evidence-based, scalable decision support that improves personalization and outcomes for patients with DGBI in routine gastroenterology practice.