Biomedical Framework Research Articles

Nurses' adherence to ethical principles - A qualitative study.

Nursing is regulated by a set of professional standards. Whilst many forms of ethics apply to nursing, the biomedical ethical framework is common, involving autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. In healthcare, nurses often encounter ethical dilemmas that require them to navigate conflicting ethical principles. However, how nurses adhere to these principles in such situations is unclear. To explore how registered nurses adhere to ethical principles when dealing with ethical dilemmas at work. A qualitative descriptive study design. Between August and December 2023, 21 registered nurses were recruited from a teaching hospital through purposive sampling. Data were collected through semi-structured in-person interviews or online video conferencing. Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis approach was employed to analyse the data. Interview participation was voluntary. Written consent was obtained before participation. Participants' real identities were replaced with pseudonyms. This study was approved by the SingHealth Centralised Institutional Review Board. The data analysis developed four major themes and 15 subthemes. The four major themes are "Addressing the dilemma," "Contemplating the principles and consequences," "Coordinating for well-informed, ethical decision," and "Self-reflecting and finding consolation." This study explains how nurses navigate and uphold ethical principles when caring for patients to the best of their ability. Fully adhering to ethical principles can be challenging for caring for actively dying patients. Further research can expound on nurses' experiences and adherence to ethical principles in complex clinical cases.

Bringing Traditional Medicine into the Health Humanities Classroom with Kali Fajardo-Anstine's "Remedies".

In this essay, we recommend Kali Fajardo-Anstine's short story "Remedies" (2019) for inclusion on health humanities syllabi based on our experiences teaching it at two undergraduate institutions. The story is drawn from Sabrina & Corina, Fajardo-Anstine's award-winning book of short stories about Chicana and Indigenous women in Colorado, but is available for free online, making it highly accessible for students. "Remedies" is narrated by Clarisa, who turns to her great-grandmother Estrella for the traditional knowledge that ultimately cures her family's recurrent outbreaks of lice. As a health narrative that centers familial and cultural healing practices, "Remedies" offers a much needed counterpart to the biomedical frameworks that tend to dominate health humanities syllabi and curricula. At the same time that it illuminates the physical and emotional efficacy of such practices, "Remedies" rejects a binary that pits them against biomedicine, offering a complex portrait of how various members of a family integrate traditional and biomedical approaches to health. We discuss how themes related to familial and cultural healing practices are developed in the story and introduce our approach to initiating productive conversations about the relationship between traditional healing and biomedicine in our classrooms.

Community-engaged randomised controlled trial to disseminate COVID-19 vaccine-related information and increase uptake among Black individuals in two US cities with rheumatic conditions.

Inequities in COVID-19 infection and vaccine uptake among historically marginalised racial and ethnic groups in the USA persist. Individuals with rheumatic conditions, especially those who are immunocompromised, are especially vulnerable to severe infection, with significant racialised inequities in infection outcomes and in vaccine uptake. Structural racism, historical injustices and misinformation engender racial and ethnic inequities in vaccine uptake. The Popular Opinion Lleader (POL) model, a community-based intervention that trains trusted community leaders to disseminate health information to their social network members (eg, friends, family and neighbours), has been shown to reduce stigma and improve care-seeking behaviours. This is a community-based cluster randomised controlled trial led by a team of community and academic partners to compare the efficacy of training POLs with rheumatic or musculoskeletal conditions using a curriculum embedded with a racial justice vs a biomedical framework to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake and reduce vaccine hesitancy. This trial began recruitment in February 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Eligible POLs are English-speaking adults who identify as Black and/or of African descent, have a diagnosis of a rheumatic or musculoskeletal condition and have received >=1 COVID-19 vaccine after 31 August 2022. POLs will be randomised to a 6-module virtual educational training; the COVID-19 and vaccine-related content will be the same for both groups however the framing for arm 1 will be with a racial justice lens and for arm 2, a biomedical preventative care-focused lens. Following the training, POLs will disseminate the information they learned to 12-16 social network members who have not received the most recent COVID-19 vaccine, over 4 weeks. The trial's primary outcome is social network member COVID-19 vaccine uptake, which will be compared between intervention arms. This trial has ethical approval in the USA. This has been approved by the Mass General Brigham Institutional Review Board (IRB, 2023P000686), the Northwestern University IRB (STU00219053), the Boston University/Boston Medical Center IRB (H-43857) and the Boston Children's Hospital IRB (P00045404). Results will be published in a publicly accessible peer-reviewed journal. NCT05822219.

The tip of the iceberg: Generalism in undergraduate medical education, a systems thinking analysis.

There is a shortage of generalist physicians globally impacting health equity and access to care. An important way in which medical schools can demonstrate social accountability is by graduating learners interested in careers in generalism. While generalism is endorsed as a matter of principle in medical education, how this translates into curricula is less clear. The aim of this study was to identify how generalism is understood and supported by family physician educational leaders in undergraduate medical education (UME) in Canada. We conducted a qualitative study, interviewing 38 family medicine leaders in UME across all 17 Canadian medical schools. We examined the data with template analysis, informed by the iceberg model of systems thinking. Four themes were identified: (1) Teaching and learning strategies in support of generalism-a consistent range existed across UME curricula; (2) Curriculum patterns-changes in leadership and curriculum reform created positive or negative feedback loops that promoted or hindered initiatives to support generalism; (3) Curriculum structures-organ-system-based curricula and availability of generalist faculty presented particular challenges to teaching generalist approaches; (4) Mental models and ways of knowing-the preponderance of biomedical frameworks of thinking in curricula unconsciously undermined generalist approaches to patient care. UME programmes promoted generalism through a range of teaching activities and strategies, but these efforts were countered by curriculum structures and mental models that perpetuate epistemic inequity between biomedical approaches to medical education and generalist models of care. Novel curricular frameworks are needed to align undergraduate programmes' commitment to social accountability with community-based need.

Experimenting with arts-based methods and affective provocations to understand complex lived experience of a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder

This article draws on arts-based psycho-social research to explore embodied and visceral knowing and feeling in the context of people living with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). It presents a discussion of creative artworks solicited through a nation-wide online survey conducted in Australia in 2021 that generated intimate and affective understanding about living with a diagnosis of BPD. To investigate what lived experiences of distress associated with a BPD diagnosis communicate through sensation, emotion, image and affective capacity, the authors put to work Blackman's (2015) concept of “productive possibilities of negative states of being” and the broader theoretical framework of new materialism. This approach allows a more transformative feeling-with that exceeds the normative affective repertoires and scripts associated with a diagnosis of BPD. The authors recognise the often unspoken and invisible affects of complex mental distress and trauma, and purposefully open the space for affective and symbolic aspects of creative artworks to communicate what is less known or has less presence in dominant biomedical frameworks about living with a BPD diagnosis. The article foregrounds the lived and living experience of participants to generate experiential rather than clinical understandings of the diagnosis.

Lessons Learned from Argentina's Struggles for Legal Abortion

This essay argues that abortion, as a practice and a political cause, challenges traditional and hegemonic health frameworks and contributes to the development of a feminist approach to health. The essay focuses on experiences and activism for legal abortion in contemporary Argentina, drawing some examples from other contexts. First, it argues that abortion reveals the extent to which health and sickness are entangled with symbolic and localized processes, including marked stigma, which influence the lived experience of health care. The essay analyzes how feminist activism in Argentina gradually changed these processes. Second, it contends that abortion as a health practice contributes to the deconstruction of traditional dichotomies between prevention and intervention and health and sickness, as well as to modifying hierarchical decision-making mechanisms. In the Argentine case, ensuring abortion access in public health institutions, with the help of activist professionals, allowed for the broadening of biomedical frameworks and a move toward more holistic approaches. Third, the essay analyzes how increasing access to medication abortion challenged monopolistic and exclusionary processes in the production and institutionalization of legitimate knowledge about health.

‘Doctors advised to take medicines to remove these thoughts’: the violence and violations in sexual mental health care in community mental health programmes in Kerala

Abstract Community mental health programmes (CMHPs) have proliferated in both governmental and non-governmental sectors in recent times in India. Although CMHPs are mandated to work in close collaboration with the community, the operationalization of community is fraught with exclusionary tendencies, particularly concerning non-cis-heteronormative sexual subjects. Mental health professionals trained in the mainstream western biopsychiatric paradigm are largely silent on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual identity discourses as they institute pathological and reductive conceptualization about sexualities, psychosocial disabilities and resultant sufferings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out at two non-governmental and a governmental CMHP in Kerala, south India, I illustrate the lack of a human rights–based approach to sex and sexual orientation and gender identity, due to which pressing concerns of sexual life are mis/overdiagnosed as mental ‘disorders’ to be treated within a biomedical framework. The lack of an intersectional approach fails the marginalized sexual subjects to exert their agency, develop critical consciousness and recognize sexuality as a political issue—all vital for transformative social change. The consequence is a dehumanized mental health care system that fails to ‘archive feelings’ that are pivotal in making invisibilized worlds observable to tell ‘unwelcome truths’ that induce psychic pain. Collaborative alliances among other marginalised sections like Queer, Dalit, tribal and Crip (disability) groups are vital in resisting intra-individual prescriptions by increasingly commercializing mental health practice in a country beset by a host of social problems including poverty, discrimination and rising inequalities. It is crucial to understand systems of power (imbalance) that operate as major (social) determinants of (sexual) mental health.

Variational Autoencoders for Biomedical Signal Morphology Clustering and Noise Detection.

Accurate estimation of physiological biomarkers using raw waveform data from non-invasive wearable devices requires extensive data preprocessing. An automatic noise detection method in time-series data would offer significant utility for various domains. As data labeling is onerous, having a minimally supervised abnormality detection method for input data, as well as an estimation of the severity of the signal corruptness, is essential. We propose a model-free, time-series biomedical waveform noise detection framework using a Variational Autoencoder coupled with Gaussian Mixture Models, which can detect a range of waveform abnormalities without annotation, providing a confidence metric for each segment. Our technique operates on biomedical signals that exhibit periodicity of heart activities. This framework can be applied to any machine learning or deep learning model as an initial signal validator component. Moreover, the confidence score generated by the proposed framework can be incorporated into different models' optimization to construct confidence-aware modeling. We conduct experiments using dynamic time warping (DTW) distance of segments to validated cardiac cycle morphology. The result confirms that our approach removes noisy cardiac cycles and the remaining signals, classified as clean, exhibit a 59.92% reduction in the standard deviation of DTW distances. Using a dataset of bio-impedance data of 97885 cardiac cycles, we further demonstrate a significant improvement in the downstream task of cuffless blood pressure estimation, with an average reduction of 2.67 mmHg root mean square error (RMSE) of Diastolic Blood pressure and 2.13 mmHg RMSE of systolic blood pressure, with increases of average Pearson correlation of 0.28 and 0.08, with a statistically significant improvement of signal-to-noise ratio respectively in the presence of different synthetic noise sources. This enables burden-free validation of wearable sensor data for downstream biomedical applications.

Intersectional Microaggressions and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Perception in Bisexual Black, Indigenous, and People of Color

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), or heart diseases, are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality nationwide. Separate bodies of research indicate that Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) individuals and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) demonstrate high risk for CVD and report greater levels of intersectional microaggressions compared with their Heterosexual White and BIPOC counterparts. Within LGB communities, Bisexual individuals report more discrimination that is associated with more CVD risk factors compared with their Heterosexual and Lesbian and Gay (LG) counterparts. Research has not examined differences in the rates of CVD risk factors between Bisexual and LG BIPOC or the associations between intersectional microaggressions and heart disease risk perception in LGB BIPOC, a relevant construct correlated with health behavior and objective risk. Participants (N= 264) self-identified as LGB BIPOC and filled out measures on their CVD risk factors, CVD risk perception, and experiences of intersectional microaggressions or intersectional minority stress. Results showed that Bisexual and LG BIPOC reported similar odds for CVD risk factors. Intersectional minority stress and CVD risk perception were positively associated with Bisexual participants only. Findings underscore the importance of extending beyond traditional biomedical frameworks of CVD risk and recognizing the unique contribution of intersectional microaggressions for LGB BIPOC, with strong associations of intersectional minority stress for Bisexual BIPOC heart health.

African philosophy and nursing: A potential twain that shall meet?

Undoubtedly, the discipline of nursing has been influenced extensively by both Western and Eastern/Asian philosophies. What remains unknown or, perhaps, poorly articulated is the potential influence of African philosophy on the onto-epistemology of nursing. As a starting point, this article sought to examine the core claims of African philosophy and how they may offer new meanings to the metaparadigm domains of interest in the discipline of nursing. At the core of African philosophy is the notion of personhood (which is distinguished from what it means to be a human being), community, solidarity, and relationality. A major claim of African philosophy is the notion that 'a person is a person through persons' which may mean that nursing will be relevant from the African philosophical perspective if it is able to attain this. Health and illness from the African philosophical perspective are defined relationally which shifts attention from the biomedical framework to holism and relational care. The sick 'person' is also distinguished from the sick 'human being' which has the potential of leading to exclusion from the African philosophical viewpoint. Put together, the African philosophical stance potentially extends the meaning of the metaparadigm domains of interest to the discipline of nursing which warrants further exploration.

Aligning the Alzheimer’s biomarker validation framework to technology readiness levels

AbstractBackgroundTechnology readiness levels (TRL), used in technological R&D, also frame European Commission biomedical funding frameworks. Providing an adaptation to biomarker development would improve communication with industry, align stakeholders and professionals, reduce risk of development failure, costs and waste. Here, we aim to align TRLs with the Strategic Biomarker Roadmap (SBR) defined to validate biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related disorders.MethodWe analyzed the NASA definition of TLR phases and a previously proposed adaptation to the biomedical field. We drafted an alignment of TRLs with the SBR Phases and Aims. We refined such alignment through discussion and consensus among coauthors and outlined discrepancies, gaps and SBR limitations relative to the TRL framework, to improve the development process for future biomarkers.ResultThe SBR covers all of the 9 TRLs. The demonstration of Analytical Validity entails TRLs_1‐4. Specifically, the SBR Phase_1 includes TRLs_1‐2; Phase_2 Primary Aim (PA) corresponds to TRL_3, and Phase_2 Secondary Aims (SAs) to TRL_4. Clinical Validity entails TRLs_5‐8. Specifically, the SBR Phase_3 corresponds to TRL_5, while TRLs_6‐8 correspond respectively to Phase_4 PA, SAs, and full completion. Demonstration of Clinical Utility corresponds to TRL_9. Despite such correspondence, the SBR entails only biomarker diagnostic performance and utility. Aspects like manufacturing and usability, fundamental in the TRL framework as well as in the previous biomedical adaptation, are still lacking. The definition of tools (e.g., Target Product Profile, introduced at TRL 3 in the biomedical adaptation) may help complement the SBR in this direction.ConclusionThe SBR and TRLs follow a consistent sequence despite different pacing and granularity, SBR steps corresponding to one‐to‐multiple TRLs. Targeting such inconsistencies and upgrading the SBR validation roadmap into a development roadmap, entailing manufacturing, usability, and an integrated procedure to assess cost‐effectiveness and plan implementation requires a structured dialogue with industry partners and other stakeholders, like regulators. Such attempt to evolve the SBR from a linear to a multi‐dimensional model may help boost the efficiency of translational research and our response to the global priority of dementia.

Beyond Biomedicine

Fourteen women of color vividly illustrate their experiences of culinary spaces circa 2015 in the zine Women of Color #11: Food and Family History (hereafter WOC11). WOC11 reveals how rituals surrounding food function as vital moments for healing someone’s psyche, soul, and body. Yet, the biomedical framework for health frequently reduces eating to physiological topics like weighing the right amount. By taking us beyond biomedicine, this article examines how food practices promote wellness linked with feelings and the body. I argue that WOC11 illustrates vernacular forms of care by naming violent processes of alienation in Western foodways and commemorating food practices that encourage wellness for the zinesters’ selves, families, and communities. Scholars in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), the argument concludes, need to expand where and what is studied by thinking about health as physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness; such topics orient the field toward the lived realities of violence and care.

Reimagining Medical Education Toward Antiracist Praxis.

Medicine has a longstanding history of racism that promulgates existing health inequities. Current medical education, largely based on the biomedical framework, omits critical discourse on racism and White supremacy, which continue to harm individuals and communities of color. Such ahistorical and apolitical orientation inadequately trains learners to identify and address racism in clinical practice. Although curricula on racial health disparities, social determinants of health, cultural competency, and implicit bias have been operationalized by several medical schools, they do not identify the racism embedded in systems of care, nor do they provide transformative steps toward true health equity and justice. As such, this article proposes bold radical frameworks as the foundation for reimagining medical education in the United States. Founded on critical race theory, abolition, and decolonization, the authors provide a view of an antiracist medical education, one that highlights the history and legacy of racism in medicine and positions medical trainees and practicing physicians as active agents in medicine's antiracist transformation.

Multispectral sensor fusion in SmartWatch for in situ continuous monitoring of human skin hydration and body sweat loss

Post-pandemic health operations have become a near-term reality, discussions around wearables are on the rise. How do wearable health solutions effectively deploy and use this opportunity to fill the gap between wellness and healthcare? In this paper, we will talk about wearable healthcare diagnosis, with a particular focus on monitoring skin hydration using optical multi-wavelength sensor fusion. Continuous monitoring of human skin hydration is a task of paramount importance for maintaining water loss dynamics for fitness lovers as well as for skin beauty, integrity and the health of the entire body. Preserving the appropriate levels of hydration ensures consistency of weight, positively affects psychological state, and proven to result in a decrease in blood pressure as well as the levels of “bad” cholesterol while slowing down the aging processes. Traditional methods for determining the state of water content in the skin do not allow continuous and non-invasive monitoring, which is required for variety of consumer, clinical and cosmetic applications. We present novel sensing technology and a pipeline for capturing, modeling and analysis of the skin hydration phenomena and associated changes therein. By expanding sensing capabilities built into the SmartWatch sensor and combining them with advanced modeling and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, we identified several important characteristics of photoplethysmography (PPG) signal and spectral sensitivity corresponding to dynamics of skin water content. In a hardware aspect, we newly propose the expansion of SmartWatch capabilities with InfraRed light sources equipped with wavelengths of 970 nm and 1450 nm. Evaluation of the accuracy and characteristics of PPG sensors has been performed with biomedical optics-based simulation framework using Monte Carlo simulations. We performed rigorous validation of the developed technology using experimental and clinical studies. The developed pipeline serves as a tool in the ongoing studies of the next generation of optical sensing technology.

Content of clinicians’ communication with patients suffering from spinal pain in assessment situations in a specialized spine center: A qualitative study evaluating psychologically informed pain assessments before and after clinicians’ participation in an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy course

IntroductionAssessment is an important part of chronic pain rehabilitation and should be conducted in line with the current biopsychosocial conceptualization of pain to capture the subjectivity and context of pain. However, pain assessment is commonly conducted from a biomedical framework. A course in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was provided to spinal pain clinicians as a framework to promote more person-centered and psychosocially focused assessments and related psychologically informed practices. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the verbal content of clinicians’ communication with patients experiencing spinal pain in assessment situations before and after clinicians participated in an ACT course.MethodsPain assessments of patients with chronic low back pain conducted by six spinal pain clinicians from different professions were audio-recorded and transcribed. This was done before and after participation in an eight-day ACT course with four following supervisions. A thematic analysis was carried out by two authors across all material, and a comparison of the applied number of codes pre-course and post-course was carried out as an indicator of change.ResultsData consisted of transcripts from the six clinicians across 23 different patients (12 before course participation). Through analysis, 11 codes were developed, which were clustered in three overarching themes: Psychological domains, Communication Techniques, and Intervention Elements. Overall, there was an increase in the application of many of the codes in the transcripts from pre-course to post-course, however with large differences across codes. Increases were primary related to the discussion of life values and value-based action and quality of life as well as the employment of mirroring, challenging beliefs and assumptions, and addressing coping and pacing.ConclusionsWhile not the case for all factors, the present findings indicate an increase in including psychological factors and employing interpersonal communication skills after a course in ACT. However, it remains unknown due to the design if the changes reported in this study reflect a clinically valuable change and whether they are due to the ACT training itself. Future research will improve our understanding of the effectiveness of this type of intervention in assessment practices.

A Co-adaptive Duality-aware Framework for Biomedical Relation Extraction.

Biomedical relation extraction is a vital task for electronic health record mining and biomedical knowledge base construction. Previous work often adopts pipeline methods or joint methods to extract subject, relation, and object while ignoring the interaction of subject-object entity pair and relation within the triplet structure. However, we observe that entity pair and relation within a triplet are highly related, which motivates us to build a framework to extract triplets that can capture the rich interactions among the elements in a triplet. We propose a novel co-adaptive biomedical relation extraction framework based on a duality-aware mechanism. This framework is designed as a bidirectional extraction structure that fully takes interdependence into account in the duality-aware extraction process of subject-object entity pair and relation. Based on the framework, we design a co-adaptive training strategy and a co-adaptive tuning algorithm as collaborative optimization methods between modules to promote better mining framework performance gain. The experiments on two public datasets show that our method achieves the best F1 among all state-of-the-art baselines and provides strong performance gain on complex scenarios of various overlapping patterns, multiple triplets, and cross-sentence triplets. Code is available at https://github.com/11101028/CADA-BioRE. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Book review: The philosophy of person‐centred healthcare, By DerekMitchell, MichaelLoughlin, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2023. 201 pp. £64.99. ISBN (10): 1‐5275‐9058‐5, ISBN (13): 978‐1‐5275‐9058‐8

Book review: The philosophy of person‐centred healthcare, By DerekMitchell, MichaelLoughlin, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2023. 201 pp. £64.99. ISBN (10): 1‐5275‐9058‐5, ISBN (13): 978‐1‐5275‐9058‐8

Depression as an Embodied Experience: Identifying the Central Role of the Body in Meaning-Making and Identity Processes.

Α significant part of the psychological research on mental health and illness is interested in how the body can impact one's mental health. This impact is primarily explored using a biomedical framework, in studies that examine the body's role in the emergence of a mental illness, the ways it can signify the presence of an illness (i.e. physical symptoms) and, finally, its role in the treatment process. Within this literature, the body is conceptualised as an object that can be diagnosed and treated. The current study approaches the body as a subject in the experience of depression. Specifically, it demonstrates that the experience of depression is embodied and that the body mediates meaning-making and identity processes. Using qualitative findings from eight interviews with Greek-Cypriot adults diagnosed with depression, we demonstrate that participants make sense of depression through their bodies, as a painful, uncomfortable and agonising experience. Further, we discuss how the struggle to regain control over the body, experienced as hijacked by depression, leads to a disrupted relation with the self and the world that expands beyond the idea of the loss of self, as described in the literature. Theoretical and clinical implications are examined.

Using ontologies for life science text-based resource organization

Ontologies are used to support access to a multitude of databases that cover domains relevant information. Heterogeneity and different semantics can be accessed by using structured texts and descriptions in a hierarchical concept definition. We are interested in Life Sciences (LS) related ontologies including components taken from molecular biology, bioinformatics, physics, chemistry, medicine and other related areas. An Ontology comprises: (i) term connections, (ii) the identification of core concepts, (iii) data management, (iv) knowledge classification and integration to collect key information. An ontology may be very useful in navigating through LS terms. This paper explores some available biomedical ontologies and frameworks. It describes the most common ontology development environments (ODE): Protégé, Topbraid Composer, Ontostudio, Fluent Editor, VocBench, Swoop and Obo-edit, to create ontologies from textual scientific resources for LS plans. It also compares ontology methodologies in terms of Usability, Scalability, Stability, Integration, Documentation and Originality.

The Coming of Age of Neodymium: Redefining Its Role in Rare Earth Doped Nanoparticles.

Among luminescent nanostructures actively investigated in the last couple of decades, rare earth (RE3+) doped nanoparticles (RENPs) are some of the most reported family of materials. The development of RENPs in the biomedical framework is quickly making its transition to the ∼800 nm excitation pathway, beneficial for both in vitro and in vivo applications to eliminate heating and facilitate higher penetration in tissues. Therefore, reports and investigations on RENPs containing the neodymium ion (Nd3+) greatly increased in number as the focus on ∼800 nm radiation absorbing Nd3+ ion gained traction. In this review, we cover the basics behind the RE3+ luminescence, the most successful Nd3+-RENP architectures, and highlight application areas. Nd3+-RENPs, particularly Nd3+-sensitized RENPs, have been scrutinized by considering the division between their upconversion and downshifting emissions. Aside from their distinctive optical properties, significant attention is paid to the diverse applications of Nd3+-RENPs, notwithstanding the pitfalls that are still to be addressed. Overall, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview on Nd3+-RENPs, discussing their developmental and applicative successes as well as challenges. We also assess future research pathways and foreseeable obstacles ahead, in a field, which we believe will continue witnessing an effervescent progress in the years to come.