Editorial: Digital mindfulness in primary care: enhancing health through technology

The World Health Organization has repeatedly emphasized that mental disorders remain a major contributor to global ill health, while service coverage continues to lag behind need, particularly in settings with limited specialist resources. At the same time, primary care has become an increasingly important site for early identification, low-intensity intervention, and continuity of mental health support, especially for common conditions such as depression and anxiety that can often be managed within primary care pathways (World Health Organization, 2025; World Health Organization Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, 2023).Against this background, digital mental health approaches have drawn growing scholarly and clinical attention because they offer the possibility of extending support beyond conventional face-to-face delivery. Within this broader landscape, digital mindfulness-including app-based, web-based, video-guided, and immersive mindfulness interventions-has emerged as a promising avenue for promoting emotional regulation, stress reduction, and psychological well-being. Recent evidence syntheses suggest that mindfulness apps and online mindfulness-based interventions can produce beneficial effects for outcomes such as depression, anxiety, distress, and well-being, although effect sizes vary and study quality, follow-up duration, and comparator conditions remain important limitations (Alrashdi et al., 2024;Linardon et al., 2024).However, the relevance of digital mindfulness to primary care cannot be reduced to questions of efficacy alone. A primary care perspective also requires attention to reach, engagement, usability, equity, and implementation. Research on digital mental health has shown that user engagement is often uneven and shaped by multiple barriers and facilitators, while broader critical scholarship has highlighted concerns related to data governance, social inequality, and the societal implications of digital mental health technologies. These issues are especially salient when digital interventions are introduced into routine care or deployed across culturally and infrastructurally diverse settings, including low-and middle-income countries (Borghouts et al., 2021;Osborne et al., 2023;Sit et al., 2024;Stein & Prost, 2024).It is within this scholarly and practical context that the present Research Topic, Digital mindfulness in primary care: Enhancing health through technology, should be situated. The 16 articles collected here reflect a field that is moving beyond simple questions of whether digital mindfulness "works" and toward more nuanced questions of how it works, for whom it works, in which delivery formats, and under what ethical and implementation conditions it can contribute meaningfully to real-world health care. Across clinical trials, observational studies, experimental research, mixed-methods development work, bibliometric mapping, and evidence syntheses, these contributions highlight both the promise and the complexity of integrating digital mindfulness into contemporary health contexts.Digital mindfulness, therefore, is no longer simply a matter of transferring meditation content onto a digital platform. Rather, it represents an expanding intervention space that includes brief and engaging delivery formats, tailored applications for specific populations, multimodal ecosystems, and immersive technologies such as virtual reality. At the same time, the field is becoming more analytically mature, with increasing attention to mechanisms, heterogeneity, user experience, and implementation feasibility-concerns that closely align with the realities of primary care, where interventions must be both scalable and clinically sensible.To provide a coherent overview, the 16 articles can be understood as clustering Taken together, the contributions in this Research Topic underscore three broader insights. First, digital mindfulness is diversifying: delivery modalities now range from short-video platforms to VR, and from single-focus apps to multimodal ecosystems.Second, the field is maturing methodologically: researchers are increasingly combining pragmatic trials, real-world observational evidence, experimental designs, and advanced modeling of mechanisms and heterogeneity. Third, implementation and ethics can no longer be treated as afterthoughts-especially when digital mental health tools are deployed across unequal infrastructures and culturally diverse settings.Ultimately, digital mindfulness in primary care should not be framed merely as a convenient substitute for face-to-face programs. Instead, it can be understood as a flexible, scalable, and potentially personalized layer of preventive and supportive care-one that must be evaluated not only for efficacy, but also for safety, equity, usability, and fit within real clinical workflows.As we conclude this Research Topic on "Digital mindfulness in primary care: Enhancing health through technology," we extend our sincere appreciation to all authors, reviewers, and editors who contributed to this collection. The work presented here reflects a field in rapid development-moving beyond proof-of-concept and toward clinically relevant, ethically grounded, and system-aware approaches to digital mental health support. We hope this Research Topic will stimulate further interdisciplinary collaboration and help advance digital mindfulness as a credible, responsible, and effective pathway for enhancing mental health within and beyond primary care.