BACKGROUND Despite high-quality evidence demonstrating that screening reduces mortality from breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancers, a substantial portion of the population remains inadequately screened. There is a critical need to identify interventions that increase the uptake and adoption of evidence-based screening guidelines for preventable cancers at the community practice level. ...

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 onl...

Abstract As mobile messaging devices are becoming smaller, for example wristwatches with Internet connectivity, there is less space for keys. Researchers have experimented with 3-key text input devices and come up with designs allowing text to be entered with as little as 4.23 keystrokes per character, but the strategies are hard to use. This paper demonstrates a dictionary-enhanced technique, ...

BACKGROUND The efficacy of antiretroviral therapy depends on patient adherence to a daily medication regimen, yet many patients fail to adhere at high enough rates to maintain health and reduce the risk of transmitting HIV. Given the explosive global growth of cellular-mobile phone use, text-messaging interventions to promote adherence are especially appropriate. This meta-analysis synthesized ...

Several systems for treating alcohol-use disorders (AUDs) exist that operate on mobile phones. These systems are categorized into four groups: text-messaging monitoring and reminder systems, text-messaging intervention systems, comprehensive recovery management systems, and game-based systems. Text-messaging monitoring and reminder systems deliver reminders and prompt reporting of alcohol consu...

BACKGROUND Mobile phone short message service (SMS) text messaging, has the potential to serve as an intervention medium to promote sustainability of weight loss that can be easily and affordably used by clinicians and consumers. OBJECTIVE To develop theoretically driven weight loss sustaining text messages and pilot an mHealth SMS text messaging intervention to promote sustaining recent weig...

BACKGROUND Obesity prevalence continues to increase worldwide, with significant associated chronic disease and health cost implications. Among more recent innovations in health service provision is the use of text messaging for health behaviour change interventions including weight management. This review investigates the efficacy of weight management programmes incorporating text messaging. ...

In this paper, we show how users combine different media when using PC-based Skype. Our research shows that Skype users combine Instant Messaging (awareness and textual messaging) with voice communication to negotiate their availability and enrich their communication by including cut-and-paste text, pictures and files into their conversations. Emerging hybrid combinations of voice, text and oth...

This paper reports on an intervention study, which considered the impact of text messaging on 9-10 year old children’s literacy skills. 114 children who had never owned a mobile phone before were recruited and randomly allocated to either the intervention or control conditions. All children were pre and post tested on a range of reading, spelling and phonological awareness measures. Children in...

CONTEXT Medication non-adherence is a commonly observed problem in the self-administration of treatment, regardless of the disease type. Text messaging reminders, as electronic reminders, provide an opportunity to improve medication adherence. In this study, we aimed to provide evidence addressing the question of whether text message reminders were effective in improving patients' adherence to ...