JMIR Publications Opens Call for Papers on Meaningful Engagement With mHealth Interventions

Toronto-based open access publisher JMIR Publications has announced a call for submissions to a new theme issue of its peer-reviewed journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth, dedicated to the question of what it actually means for users to engage meaningfully with mobile health interventions. The announcement, issued on October 13, 2026, arrives at a moment when the digital health landscape is saturated with applications, wearables, and smartphone-based tools, yet the field continues to grapple with a stubborn and well-documented problem: most people stop using these tools long before they can deliver any lasting clinical benefit. The theme issue, titled Advancing Meaningful Engagement With mHealth Interventions, is intended to gather innovative research and provocative viewpoints that challenge foundational assumptions about how users interact with digital health technologies, and it signals a deliberate shift in how the journal wants the field to think about engagement itself.

The core of the problem, as framed by the editors behind the theme issue, is that engagement has historically been measured in ways that are easy to quantify but difficult to interpret. Downloads, session counts, click-through rates, and days of active use have long served as the default metrics of digital health research, and they have produced a large body of literature linking demographic variables to usage patterns. What those metrics have not produced, the editors argue, is a clear understanding of whether the interactions they capture are sufficient to achieve the desired clinical or health outcomes. The theme issue therefore adopts a working concept of meaningful engagement, defined as interaction with a tool at an intensity and duration adequate to produce the health benefit the intervention was designed to deliver. This reframing moves the field past simple associations between demographics and clicks, and past the mere quantification of use patterns, toward a more functional question: did the engagement actually do anything?

The stakes of this reframing are considerable. Poor engagement, characterized by high attrition rates and inconsistent usage patterns, is widely recognized as a limiting factor in the efficacy, scalability, and long-term health impact of digital health tools. An intervention that works in a controlled trial, where participants are prompted and monitored, may fail entirely in the real world, where users abandon apps within days or weeks. If the field cannot distinguish between engagement that is clinically meaningful and engagement that is merely frequent, it cannot design interventions that sustain the right kind of use. The editors position a deeper understanding of engagement as foundational to building more sustainable, user-centered health technologies, and they note that while there have been many attempts to define, measure, and promote engagement, the rapid evolution of mHealth tools demands a reflexive and updated approach rather than a fixed set of legacy metrics.

According to the call for papers, the theme issue will prioritize innovative research that treats engagement as a primary outcome in its own right, rather than as a secondary variable or a descriptive statistic buried in the methods section of a trial report. The editors are explicitly seeking work that unpacks the role of engagement within complex, multicomponent interventions, where the active ingredients of behavior change may be entangled with design features, delivery channels, and user context. This is a technically demanding ask. Multicomponent interventions, which might combine push notifications, tailored content, sensor-based feedback, and clinician contact, make it difficult to isolate which component drives engagement and which drives outcomes. Research that can disentangle those threads, and that can demonstrate a causal or mechanistic link between specific patterns of interaction and specific health results, is exactly what the editors say they want to feature.

One of the six topic areas listed in the call concerns moving beyond frequency of use to establish frameworks for meaningful engagement. This is arguably the most conceptually significant of the themes, because it invites researchers to propose new theoretical and operational definitions rather than simply reporting more usage data. A framework for meaningful engagement would need to specify what threshold, pattern, or quality of interaction corresponds to a desired outcome, and it would need to be validated across different populations, conditions, and intervention types. The editors are also calling for research on the complex psychosocial factors beyond simple demographics that drive user interaction, a nod to a growing body of work suggesting that motivation, self-efficacy, trust, digital literacy, and social context may explain engagement behaviors far better than age, sex, or socioeconomic category alone.

A second cluster of topics addresses the practical side of the engagement problem. The editors invite submissions on methods and strategies to increase both short-term and long-term engagement, on design elements and considerations that promote meaningful engagement with mHealth tools, and on implementation considerations that increase engagement with mHealth interventions as they are deployed in real-world settings. These three themes together span the full lifecycle of a digital health product, from the initial interface decisions that shape a user’s first impression, through the behavioral strategies that keep a user returning in the weeks after adoption, to the organizational and health-system factors that determine whether an intervention survives contact with routine clinical care. The inclusion of implementation science in the scope is notable, because it acknowledges that engagement is not solely a property of the software but also of the environment in which it is used.

The final topic area points toward the methodological frontier: evolving approaches to predict mHealth engagement, including machine learning, sensing technologies, and novel patient engagement approaches. Predictive modeling of engagement is a rapidly growing subfield, with researchers training algorithms on early usage traces, passive sensor data from smartphones and wearables, and self-reported psychosocial measures to forecast which users are likely to disengage before it happens. Such models could in principle enable adaptive interventions that respond to predicted disengagement with tailored support, but they also raise methodological questions about validation, generalizability across populations, and the risk of encoding existing biases into engagement predictions. By explicitly welcoming machine learning and sensing approaches alongside novel patient engagement strategies, the theme issue is positioning itself at the intersection of data science and behavioral science, where much of the field’s near-term innovation is expected to occur.

JMIR mHealth and uHealth, the journal hosting the theme issue, is described by the publisher as a premier, peer-reviewed outlet in the mobile and ubiquitous health space, indexed in MEDLINE, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, PsycINFO, SCIE, JCR, EBSCO and EBSCO Essentials, DOAJ, and GoOA. That indexing profile matters for authors, because it signals that submissions to the theme issue will be visible across the major biomedical and bibliographic databases that researchers, clinicians, and policymakers rely on. The journal is part of a broader portfolio published by JMIR Publications, a leading open access publisher of digital health research that also produces the renowned Journal of Medical Internet Research. The publisher describes itself as a champion of open science with a focus on author advocacy and research amplification, providing tools and resources that support researchers at every step of the dissemination process, and the content of the announcement is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted reuse with proper citation.

For the digital health research community, the theme issue represents an invitation to revisit one of the field’s most persistent weaknesses with fresh eyes. The gap between the promise of mHealth and its real-world impact has been documented for years, and attrition remains the quiet killer of otherwise well-designed interventions. By asking researchers to treat engagement as a primary outcome, to look beyond demographics and click counts, and to bring psychosocial theory, novel measurement, machine learning, and implementation science to bear on the problem, JMIR Publications is effectively setting an agenda for the next phase of the field’s maturation. Researchers interested in submitting can find the full call for papers and submission details on the JMIR mHealth and uHealth website, and the publisher’s media contact for the announcement is [email protected].

Subject of Research: A call for papers on advancing meaningful engagement with mobile health interventions in the journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth

Article Title: JMIR Publications invites submissions on Advancing Meaningful Engagement With mHealth Interventions

Article References: JMIR Publications invites submissions on Advancing Meaningful Engagement With mHealth Interventions. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: mHealth, digital health, JMIR Publications, JMIR mHealth and uHealth, meaningful engagement, user engagement, theme issue, call for papers, mobile health interventions, machine learning, psychosocial factors, open access publishing