BACKGROUND An estimated two billion people, over one third of the world's population, have latent infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (LTBI). Patient adherence to LTBI treatment is currently poor given that individuals show no symptoms of illness and may not feel that they are at risk of developing active tuberculosis (TB). Short text messages can serve as a simple reminder to take medica...

The aim of this study is to assess whether a text message reminder service designed to support health worker adherence to a revised malaria treatment protocol is feasible and acceptable in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The study took place in six purposively selected health facilities located in the Eastern Highlands Province (EHP) of PNG. Ten text messages designed to remind participants of key elem...

BACKGROUND Young adults are a particularly hard to reach group using conventional health promotion practices as they do not see nutrition messages as personally relevant to them. Text messaging (short message service, SMS) offers an innovative approach to reaching young adults to support and promote dietary behavior change. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to develop and test tonal prefere...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to identify features and content that short message service (SMS) should have in order to motivate HIV testing among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Lima, Peru. METHODS From October, 2010 to February, 2011, we conducted focus groups at two stages; six focus groups were conducted to explore and identify SMS content and features and two additional foc...

BACKGROUND Process evaluation is essential in developing, piloting and evaluating complex interventions. This often involves observation of intervention delivery and interviews with study participants. Mobile telephone interventions involve no face to face contact, making conventional process evaluation difficult. This study assesses the utility of novel techniques for process evaluation involv...

INTRODUCTION Pictorial cigarette warning labels often contain text-messages about severity of health risks and less often about the likelihood of health risks. We aimed to examine the influence of severity of risk versus likelihood of risk text-messages on information-seeking behavior. METHODS Study 1: An experimental study with a 2 (severity) × 2 (likelihood) between-subjects design (n = 260...

In recent times telecommunications revolution especially the use of mobile phones is transforming the Nigerian society in many ways. The socio-economic and cultural impacts are enormous. As the spectrum of mobile phone usage increases, opinion differs among users on the impact of this revolution in Nigerian. This paper therefore set to investigate the impact of telecommunications revolution esp...

BACKGROUND Mobile technology to promote exercise is effective; however, most evidence is from studies of younger groups in high-income countries. Investigating if short message service (SMS) texting can affect exercise participation in older adults from an upper-middle-income country is important considering the proliferation of mobile phones in developing regions and the increased interest of ...

Technology is enabling behaviour change interventions to incorporate text message reminders as a support to traditional intervention programmes, especially in the fields of smoking cessation, diabetes management, and weight loss. In this study, the intention was to trial a brief alcohol intervention which included web and mobile phone text elements enabling participants to create and schedule p...

BACKGROUND Screening for alcohol misuse and brief interventions (BIs) for harm in trauma care settings are known to reduce alcohol intake and injury recidivism, but are rarely implemented. We created the content for a mobile phone text message BI service to reduce harmful drinking among patients admitted to hospital following an injury who screen positive for hazardous alcohol use. The aim of t...