The development of mHealth applications is often driven by the investigators and developers with relatively little input from the targeted population. User input is commonly limited to "like/dislike" post- intervention consumer satisfaction ratings or device or application specific user analytics such as usability. However, to produce successful mHealth applications with lasting effects on heal...

BACKGROUND Low back pain (LBP) occurrence and intensity are considered to fluctuate over time, requiring frequent repetitive assessments to capture its true time pattern. Text messages makes frequent reporting of LBP feasible, which enables investigation of 1) the time pattern of LBP, and 2) predictors for having a continued high (chronic) level of LBP over longer periods of time. However, this...

BACKGROUND Physicians' daily work is increasingly affected by the use of emails, text messages and cell phone calls with their patients. The aim of this study was to describe their use between primary-care physicians and patients in a French-speaking part of Switzerland. METHODS A cross-sectional mail survey was conducted among all primary-care physicians of Geneva canton (n = 636). The quest...

While text messages or short messaging service programs are increasingly utilized for delivering health education, few studies have explored the unique challenges of recruiting and retaining participants in such programs. This study utilizes survey and focus group data from Text2BHealthy, a short messaging service-based nutrition and physical activity promotion program, to examine barriers to e...

Study objectives: The study investigated the prevalence and associated factors (media coverage in particular) of stress related responses to the December 2004 tsunami. Design: An anonymous population based cross sectional telephone survey was conducted. Post-traumatic stress symptom was measured by the locally validated Chinese impact of event scale (CIES) and whether the respondent felt distur...

Message classification is a text classification task that has provoked much interest in machine learning. One aspect of message classification that presents a particular challenge is the classification of short text messages. This paper presents an assessment of applying a casebased reasoning approach that was developed for long text messages (specifically spam filtering) to short text messages...

Identifying intentions of users plays a crucial role in providing better user services, such as web-search and automated message-handling. There is a significant literature on extracting speakers’ intentions and speech acts from spoken words, and this paper proposes a novel approach on extracting intentions from non-spoken words, such as web-search query texts, and text messages. Unlike spoken ...