A new study has found that asthma attacks can be kept at bay by sending children text messages asking them about their symptoms and providing information about their illness.
In a study by the Georgia Institute of Technology, scientists found that when patients, especially children suffering from asthma, were sent SMS text messages daily asking them about the symptoms of their condition and providing them more information about their illness, the asthma attacks they experienced reduced, and their conditions improved within four months compared to groups that didn't receive text messages.
"It appears that text messages acted as an implicit reminder for patients to take their medicine and by the end of the study, the kids were more in tune with their illness," said study leader Rosa Arriaga, senior research scientist in the College of Computing's School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.
T.J. Yun, former Georgia Tech Ph.D. student, and Arriaga presented the research findings at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2013. The study has been titled "A Text Message a Day Keeps the Pulmonologist Away." The research comes as a positive achievement for the future of mHealth studies, a trend based on the idea that mobile devices can be used to improve health and wellness.
Asthma is an illness that affects 17.3 million individuals, including more than 5 million children in the United States. Though medication has been sought to be the best way to tackle asthma symptoms, more than 30 percent of teenagers in the country continue to use inhalers.
The curiousness of researchers to see if cellphones can help asthma patients led to the origin of this study. Since more than 75 percent of American teenagers use cell phones for texting daily, scientists were curious to know if this could help them in any way.
For the study, 30 asthmatic children from a private pediatric pulmonology clinic in Atlanta were divided into three groups. The first group didn't receive any text messages, the second received text messages every alternate day, and the third group received texts every day.
After a period of four months, it was discovered that the group that received texts every day showed more improvement in their condition than the other two groups.
"The results indicate that both awareness and knowledge are crucial to individuals engaging in proactive behavior to improve their condition," Arriaga said.
