Journal of Pediatric Psychology | 2019
Introduction to the Coordinated Special Issue on eHealth/mHealth in Pediatric Psychology
Abstract
Ten years ago, the Journal of Pediatric Psychology published its first special issue on the eHealth in pediatric psychology (Ritterband & Palermo, 2009). The issue reflected the nascent stage of the field with reports focused on willingness to use the internet for health promotion, the development of internet interventions with a focus on feasibility and usability, a limited number of efficacy trials, and some of the first forays into the mHealth space using PDAs and cellphones. The issue also reflected the emphasis in pediatric psychology at the time to develop, validate, and disseminate more intervention technologies. In many ways, this focus served to realize the important vision that eHealth/mHealth approaches might reduce barriers to getting “what works” to the most vulnerable and difficult to reach youth. The field has matured in the intervening decade since the last special issue on eHealth/mHealth. To be sure, there is still a long way to go before meeting the vision of Ritterband & Palermo (2009) that eHealth/ mHealth interventions might, “. . .reach more children and their families than would otherwise be served through more traditional forms of care.” However, more protocols have reached the efficacy phase, and move into a dissemination phase. In other words, the roadmap for porting what works in the face-to-face space into a digital medium is clearer (Ritterband et al., 2003). The field is poised to take on the threefold task of: (a) fully translating face-to-face interventions into digital media, (b) using eHealth/mHealth technologies to develop or test innovative theories that may optimize future interventions, and (c) designing and testing interventions that fully leverage the adaptive capabilities of digital platforms. The goal of the current special issue is to provide a snapshot of the progress toward the three objectives above, and to coordinate with a companion issue of Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology, which highlights both feasibility trials and specific clinicallyfocused translational or dissemination work. The issue contains a series of commentaries serving as an organizing document (i.e., the current paper), a state of the funding picture at the National Institutes of Health (Riley et al., 2018), and a commentary on the ability of eHealth/mHealth approaches to usher in a new way of thinking about scientific psychology (Cushing, Monzon, Ortega, Bejarano, & Carlson, this issue). Beyond these commentaries, the current issue can be subdivided into three types of articles: (a) innovative approaches using mobile methodologies to collect data, develop theory, and model psychological processes; (b) techniques for designing or refining eHealth/mHealth studies and interventions; and (c) descriptions of outcomes in pediatric psychology clinical trials that leverage eHealth components. Investigators are grappling with the opportunities presented by collecting dense in situ data from mobile devices. For example, in this issue, Mangelsdorf, Mehl, Qiu, & Alisic (2019) leveraged very temporally dense audio data to unobtrusively monitor the family environment following a pediatric injury. Using a novel application of the Electronically Activated