JMIR mhealth and uhealth

Background: Communication between patients and medical staff can be challenging if both parties have different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Specialized applications can potentially alleviate these problems and significantly contribute to an effective, improved care process when foreign language patients are involved. Objective: The objective for this paper was to discuss the experiences gained from a study carried out at the Hannover Medical School regarding the use of a mobile...

Background: In a growing number of intervention studies, mobile phones are used to support self-management of people with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). However, it is difficult to establish knowledge about factors associated with intervention effects, due to considerable differences in research designs and outcome measures as well as a lack of detailed information about participants’ engagement with the intervention tool. Objective: To contribute toward accumulating knowledge about...

Background: Mobile health (mHealth) technologies provide many potential benefits to the delivery of health care. Medical decision support tools have shown particular promise in improving quality of care and provider workflow. Frontline health workers such as Community Health Workers (CHWs) have been shown to be effective in extending the reach of care, yet only a few medicine dosing tools are available to them. Objective: We developed an mHealth medicine dosing tool tailored to the skill...

Background: Individual and group-based behavioral weight loss treatment (BWL) produces average weight loss of 5-10% of initial body weight, which improves health and wellbeing. However, BWL is an intensive treatment that is costly and not widely available. Smartphones may be a useful tool for promoting adherence to key aspects of BWL, such as self-monitoring, thereby facilitating weight loss while reducing the need for intensive in-person contact. Objective: The objective of this study was...

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 weight loss in order to understand optimal frequency and timing of message delivery, and for feasibility...