Using SMS to automate data collection and deliver health promotion messages: The Be Fit with Friends (BFF) solution

The explosive growth of mobile phones as a potentially powerful health communications tool has attracted the attention of public health practitioners. Mobile phones are appealing because they are personal, portable, connected, and ”smart.” Use of mobile technology for health care, known as mobile health (mHealth), has been used for remote patient monitoring, information dissemination and behavior change (e.g., smoking cessation). Although mobile phone-based health monitoring will be a top five consumer mobile application in 2012, the fragmented cell phone market utilizing various mobile networks, communication protocols, operating systems, and phone types/features presents challenges to creating advanced health applications. Therefore, text-messaging (Short Message Service or “SMS”) offers a simple low-cost option to reach large audiences. Be Fit with Friends (BFF), a physical activity intervention among girls 11-14 years uses SMS to disseminate health and physical activity information, provide motivational messages and event reminders, and gather evaluation data and program feedback. We developed a new reconfigurable and automated messaging system to accomplish these communication goals. This messaging system contains client accounts; capability to create/remove client “attributes” (e.g., age, gender); “grouping” logic to define various cohorts (e.g., intervention/control, stage of change) for comparative analysis or group-specific broadcast messaging; “polling” capability to collect client responses, as well as advanced message history tracking and message scheduling to determine dose/exposure. The messaging system described in this presentation is being tested with 30 Hispanic girls participating in BFF. Sharing the BFF technological solution will assist other public health practitioners interested in utilizing SMS to improve health behavior.