Mobile Phone Messaging in Health Care – Where are we Now ?

Mobile phone text messaging (Short Message Service, SMS) has proved to be a powerful tool for many tasks in health care. It is affordable and instant way for communication between health care personnel and patients, enabling different kinds of control and monitoring applications, improving adherence in self-management of chronic diseases or healthy lifestyle programs etc. However, it is not only textual data that can be transmitted by mobile phone messaging. Multimedia Message Service (MMS) makes it possible to send images, video sequences and audio attached to the message. This has significant potential in health care applications, and an amount of research has been made recently on this field. In this paper, we review the recent development in the mobile phone messaging in health care. Special attention has been paid in the discussion of the current state of the art of text messaging as well as the potentiality of multimedia data that can be utilized by means of multimedia messaging. *Corresponding author: Iivari Bäck, Tampere University of Technology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Koskenalantie 16, FI-60220 Seinäjoki, Finland, Tel: + 358 40 8490714; E-mail: [email protected] Received December 14, 2011; Accepted January 07, 2012; Published January 09, 2012 Citation: Bäck I, Mäkelä K (2012) Mobile Phone Messaging in Health Care – Where are we Now? J Inform Tech Soft Engg 2:106. doi:10.4172/2165-7866.1000106 Copyright: © 2012 Bäck I, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Introduction Mobile computing and communication technology interventions for improving health care and health service outcomes, referred as M-health [1] are used nowadays on a wide range from data collection and information transmission to supporting health behavior change. Many practicalities of the health care system can be made automatic and easier for both patients and health care stuff by using mobile phones. Text messaging, i.e. short message service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) are the most widely used mobile communication methods after phone calls. In principle, text message can be used either as a one-way communication to provide the user information such as reminder, alert, etc, or as a two-way communication that enables the user to send and receive information (such as question and answer). Mobile messages are an excellent aid for communication when there is a need to submit information also at long distances or without well working health infrastructure, or when the people cannot physically meet the health care workers. Provided that the cost of the text message is very low and it is available to practically everyone, it has been found useful to employ the text messaging in many routine-like health care applications. Typical examples of these application areas are e.g. different kinds of reminders and instructions, reporting of laboratory test results or home measurements, remote controlling and monitoring etc. By using this kind of communication, it is possible to save resources by e.g. avoiding unnecessary hospital visits and phone calls, and z`make health care process more efficient by automatically sending, receiving, storing and processing the patient data. The mobile phone messaging in health care has been a subject of active research work about a decade. Wei et al. [2] presented a literature review including 24 articles on the use of text messaging for clinical and healthy behavior interventions. In paper of Cole-Lewis and Kershaw [3], a review on the behavior change interventions for disease management and prevention delivered through text messaging is presented. Krishna et al. [4] have made an article on the state-of–theart of the use of mobile phones and text messaging interventions in improving health outcomes and processes of care. The present study has three major goals. First of all, we review current state-of-the-art of the work made on the use of the text messages (SMS) in health care applications in general, without emphasizing merely on any specific area as the survey papers mentioned above. The second goal is to review the work made on the usage of the multimedia messaging (including images, video and audio) in health care related messaging. The multimedia messaging (MMS) has great potential in health care applications, but it has received reasonably low amount of attention in the literature. For this reason, the third goal of the paper is to analyze and discuss the possibilities of the use of the multimedia data in health care related mobile messaging, and identify the benefits and drawbacks. The review made in this paper was carried out as a Internet database search in April-July 2011. A search of PubMed database was conducted using the keywords: (mobile phone messaging OR text messaging OR multimedia messaging OR SMS OR MMS) AND (health care OR telemedicine OR telecare OR e-health). In addition, we examined the reference lists of the papers that were found in the database search. In practice, the most of the relevant papers were found in the leading journals in the field of telemedicine, telecare and e-health. To ensure that all the relevant papers were included, the database search described above was repeated also in the databases of these journals. All the relevant papers were reviewed, and those suiting to the scope of this article were selected. The inclusion criteria for the papers selected for the review were the following: 1) Publication year: 2000 or later, 2) the paper clearly presents an application of mobile phone messaging (SMS or MMS) in health care, 3) The paper includes experimental data on the use of mobile phone messaging in health care. In addition to these reviewed papers, we have included several other studies from other journals and conferences that bring additional viewpoints and use cases for this article. Many of these additional articles were found from the reference list of the reviewed papers. Text Messaging (SMS) in Health Care – A Review The text messaging applications can be divided into four major groups. Remote controlling and monitoring applications are used as a tool to support e.g. home management of some chronic diseases or to send notifications on emergencies. In the information services, the goal is to employ mobile messages to send and distribute information. In the applications related to the adherence, the messaging is used to support e.g. treatments, healthy lifestyle programmes or self-management. In