Open Access in JAH
Digital Health Technology to Enhance Adolescent and Young Adult Clinical Preventive Services: Affordances and Challenges
The lives of adolescents and young adults (AYAs) have become increasingly intertwined with technology. In this scoping review, studies about digital health tools are summarized in relation to five key affordances—social, cognitive, identity, emotional, and functional. Consideration of how a platform or tool exemplifies these affordances may help clinicians and researchers achieve the goal of using digital health technology to enhance clinical preventive services for AYAs. Across these five affordances, considerable research and development activity exists accompanied by signs of high promise, although the literature primarily reflects demonstration studies of acceptability or small sample experiments to discern impact.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.Fostering Engagement in Health Behavior Change: Iterative Development of an Interactive Narrative Environment to Enhance Adolescent Preventive Health Services
Accidents and unintentional injuries account for the greatest number of adolescent deaths, often involving use of alcohol and other substances. This article describes the iterative design and development of Interactive Narrative System for Patient-Individualized Reflective Exploration (INSPIRE), a narrative-centered behavior change environment for adolescents focused on reducing alcohol use. INSPIRE is designed to serve as an extension to clinical preventive care, engaging adolescents in a theoretically grounded intervention for health behavior change by leveraging 3D game engine and interactive narrative technologies.Innovative Digital Technologies to Improve Adolescent and Young Adult Health
The lives of adolescents and young adults (AYAs) have become increasingly intertwined with technology. Multidisciplinary perspectives and collaboration are needed to capitalize on the strategic use of technology during key developmental windows. Technology-rich models of behavior change, with opportunities for personalizing health interventions, offer significant transformative potential to improve adolescent and young adult health. There is considerable momentum behind advancing integration of digital health technology to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the clinical encounter, and rapid advances in technology provide mechanisms for enabling AYAs to take agentic roles in promoting health practice and policy.
