Open Access in JAH
Promotion of Preconception Care Among Adolescents and Young Adults by Conversational Agent
Preconception care is important for all women to improve infant and maternal health outcomes and may be especially important for adolescents and young adults. This study assesses the acceptance, usability, and use of an automated intervention to screen women on 108 preconception care risks and address them over the course of a year via a Web-based virtual animated health counselor and compares these measures for the adolescent and young adult users aged 18–25 years with those of users aged 26–34 years.Leveraging Technology to Improve Health in Adolescence: A Developmental Science Perspective
As technologies continue to evolve at exponential rates, online platforms are becoming an increasingly salient social context for adolescents. Adolescents are often early adopters, savvy users, and innovators of technology use. This not only creates new vulnerabilities but also presents new opportunities for positive impact—particularly, the use of technology to promote healthy learning and adaptation during developmental windows of opportunity. For example, early adolescence appears to represent a developmental inflection point in health trajectories and in technology use in ways that may be strategically targeted for prevention and intervention.
