Optimal management of atopic dermatitis (AD) requires patients to adhere to self-care behaviors. Technologies, such as cell phones, have been widely adopted in the USA and have potential to reinforce positive health behaviors. We conducted a pilot study with 25 adolescents and adults age 14 years and older [mean 30.5 yrs, SD 13.4] with AD. Daily text messages (TMs) that provided medication remi...

PURPOSE This study identified the extent and nature of engagement with a theoretically based behaviour change text message intervention intended to reduce binge drinking. The data were from a randomised controlled trial tackling binge drinking among socially disadvantaged men. METHOD An intervention, comprising 112 text messages, and based on the principles of the Health Action Process Approa...

The treatment for tuberculosis is a combination of strong antibiotics that must be taken daily for at least 6 months. But side-effects, such as nausea and heartburn, dissuade some patients from sticking with the treatment. Other patients endure the side-effects only to drop the medication once they feel better 1 or 2 months into the regimen. The Stop TB Partnership reports that on average 5% of...

Pronouns are frequently dropped in Chinese sentences, especially in informal data such as text messages. In this work we propose a solution to recover dropped pronouns in SMS data. We manually annotate dropped pronouns in 684 SMS files and apply machine learning algorithms to recover them, leveraging lexical, contextual and syntactic information as features. We believe this is the first work on...

Writing text messages (e.g. email, SMS, instant messaging) is a popular form of synchronous and asynchronous communication. However, when it comes to notifying users about new messages, current audio-based approaches, such as notification tones, are very limited in conveying information. In this paper we show how entire text messages can be encoded into a meaningful and euphonic melody in such ...

BACKGROUND Men who have sex with men (MSM) continue to be severely and disproportionately affected by the HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome) epidemic in the United States. Effective antiretroviral therapy has altered the HIV epidemic from being an acute disease to a chronic, manageable condition for many people living with HIV. The pervasiveness, low cos...

BACKGROUND A wide range of effective smoking cessation interventions have been developed to help smokers to quit. Smoking rates remain high, especially among people with a lower level of education. Multiple tailoring adapted to the individual's readiness to quit and the use of visual messaging may increase smoking cessation. OBJECTIVE The results of video and text computer tailoring were comp...

We present experiments using language models to rank e-mail messages for the Known-Item Finding task of the Enterprise track. We combine evidence from the text of the message, its subject, the text of the thread the in which the message occurs, and the text of messages that are in reply to the message. We find that the only statistically significant differences suggest that in addition to the t...

The death of a loved one is an emotional-laden experience, and while grief and mourning rituals are less formal today in many communities, there remain some social norms for individuals to process loss. The death of an ex-family member, such as a former spouse, is more complicated and expectations for how to respond are fraught with uncertainty. While grief has been studied and is primarily und...

AIM Public access defibrillation rarely reaches out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients in residential areas. We developed a text message (TM) alert system, dispatching local lay rescuers (TM-responders). We analyzed the functioning of this system, focusing on response times and early defibrillation in relation to other responders. METHODS In July 2013, 14112 TM-responders and 1550 aut...