515,073 research outputs found

    Guiding Ebola Patients to Suitable Health Facilities: An SMS-based Approach

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    We propose to utilize mobile phone technology as a vehicle for people to report their symptoms and to receive immediate feedback about the health services readily available, and for predicting spatial disease outbreak risk. Once symptoms are extracted from the patients text message, they undergo complex classification, pattern matching and prediction to recommend the nearest suitable health service. The added benefit of this approach is that it enables health care facilities to anticipate arrival of new potential Ebola cases

    Opaque Service Virtualisation: A Practical Tool for Emulating Endpoint Systems

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    Large enterprise software systems make many complex interactions with other services in their environment. Developing and testing for production-like conditions is therefore a very challenging task. Current approaches include emulation of dependent services using either explicit modelling or record-and-replay approaches. Models require deep knowledge of the target services while record-and-replay is limited in accuracy. Both face developmental and scaling issues. We present a new technique that improves the accuracy of record-and-replay approaches, without requiring prior knowledge of the service protocols. The approach uses Multiple Sequence Alignment to derive message prototypes from recorded system interactions and a scheme to match incoming request messages against prototypes to generate response messages. We use a modified Needleman-Wunsch algorithm for distance calculation during message matching. Our approach has shown greater than 99% accuracy for four evaluated enterprise system messaging protocols. The approach has been successfully integrated into the CA Service Virtualization commercial product to complement its existing techniques.Comment: In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (pp. 202-211). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.0142

    Text Messaging Appointment Reminders to Increase Patient Appointment Adherence within a Prevention and Wellness Program

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    Abstract Healthcare organizations want to provide quality care, decrease costs, and promote preventative services for the communities they service. Mobile health units have become an extension of many healthcare organizations and provide different types of services, such as mammography. Providing mammography and wellness exams on a mobile unit presents several challenges; appointment adherence is one of them. Mobile units typically travel to underserved areas to serve people at risk for various health conditions such as breast cancer. Breast cancer is estimated to affect over 250,000 women in the United States during 2017; women have a 1:8 lifetime risk of being diagnosed withbreast cancer (American Cancer Society, 2017). Text messaging (SMS) is a new technology that can be used to aid healthcare organizations in increasing their attendance rate to appointments. With 95% of Americans owning a cell phone and 73% of them engaging in text activity, it was hypothesized that text message appointment reminders would increase appointment adherence (Pew Research Center, 2011). A pilot study was implemented in a Prevention and Wellness department that provides mammogram screenings and wellness exams on a mobile unit. Implementation of text message appointment reminders was conducted for one month. Retrospective analysis of the data was conducted during the one month period. In total, 240 women attended their screening appointment. The non-attendance appointment rate for the intervention cohort group was 4.94%; the nonattendance rate for the customary method cohort group was 6.43%. There was a 23% reduction in non-attendance rate after the implementation of text message reminders. Keywords: text messaging, appointment adherence, mammogram, mobile uni

    MMS (Multimedia Message Service) Service Adoption Rates in Algeria

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    This thesis tries to analyze the factors that affect the intention to adopt Multimedia message service (MMS) among users in Algeria. Innovation diffusion theory was chosen as the basis of framework to better explain customer's acceptance of this new mobile service. MMS provides more multimedia communication with entertainment effects than current text base short message service (SMS). The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the occurrence of MMS from a user's perspective, to present a definition of this new message service and provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. The main objective is to present a theoretical framework regarding MMS usage and to empirically investigate which user related factors to consider, when developing services adapted for mobile message use. Survey was chosen to gather the data. The measures and hypotheses were analyzed using SPSS. Results show that Ease of use, perceived enjoyment and perceived media richness significantly influence passenger's intention towards adopting MMS in Algeria. At last, the implications of the findings are discussed

    A healthy lifestyle text message intervention for adolescents: protocol for the Health4Me randomized controlled trial.

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    BACKGROUND: Adolescence presents a window of opportunity to establish good nutrition and physical activity behaviours to carry throughout the life course. Adolescents are at risk of developing cardiovascular and other chronic diseases due to poor the complex interplay of physical and mental health lifestyle risk factors. Text messaging is adolescents main form of everyday communication and text message programs offer a potential solution for support and improvement of lifestyle health behaviours. The primary aim of this study is to determine effectiveness of the Health4Me text message program to improve adolescent's physical activity or nutrition behaviours among adolescents over 6-months, compared to usual care. METHODS: Health4Me is a virtual, two-arm, single-blind randomised controlled trial, delivering a 6-month healthy lifestyle text message program with optional health counselling. Recruitment will be through digital advertising and primary care services. In total, 330 adolescents will be randomised 1:1 to intervention or control (usual care) groups. The intervention group will receive 4-5 text messages per week for 6-months. All text messages have been co-designed with adolescents. Messages promote a healthy lifestyle by providing practical information, health tips, motivation and support for behaviour change for physical activity, nutrition, mental health, body image, popular digital media and climate and planetary health. Virtual assessments will occur at baseline and 6-months assessing physical health (physical activity, nutrition, body mass index, sleep), mental health (quality of life, self-efficacy, psychological distress, anxiety, depression, eating disorder risk) and lifestyle outcomes (food insecurity and eHealth literacy). DISCUSSION: This study will determine the effectiveness of a 6-month healthy lifestyle text message intervention to improve physical activity and nutrition outcomes in adolescents. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australia New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR) ACTRN12622000949785 , Date registered: 05/07/2022

    Assessing the Effectiveness of Partners in Quitting, a Text Message-Based Smoking Cessation Program

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    This presentation will discuss the implementation of Partners in Quitting, a new text message-based smoking cessation program. It will also provide preliminary data on client engagement rates, program effectiveness, and program challenges. Partners in Quitting is an outreach program that has been implemented at Bread for the City, a large DC hub for free health and social services. Partners in Quitting provides an evidence-based, easily accessible, and comprehensive smoking cessation program to the clients of Bread for the City

    Short Messages Spam Filtering Using Sentiment Analysis

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    In the same way that short instant messages are more and more used, spam and non-legitimate campaigns through this type of communication systems are growing up. Those campaigns, besides being an illegal online activity, are a direct threat to the privacy of the users. Previous short messages spam filtering techniques focus on automatic text classification and do not take message polarity into account. Focusing on phone SMS messages, this work demonstrates that it is possible to improve spam filtering in short message services using sentiment analysis techniques. Using a publicly available labelled (spam/legitimate) SMS dataset, we calculate the polarity of each message and aggregate the polarity score to the original dataset, creating new datasets. We compare the results of the best classifiers and filters over the different datasets (with and without polarity) in order to demonstrate the influence of the polarity. Experiments show that polarity score improves the SMS spam classification, on the one hand, reaching to a 98.91% of accuracy. And on the other hand, obtaining a result of 0 false positives with 98.67% of accuracy

    Text message-based diabetes self-management support (SMS4BG): study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

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    BACKGROUND: Addressing the increasing prevalence, and associated disease burden, of diabetes is a priority of health services internationally. Interventions to support patients to effectively self-manage their condition have the potential to reduce the risk of costly and debilitating complications. The utilisation of mobile phones to deliver self-management support allows for patient-centred care at the frequency and intensity that patients desire from outside the clinic environment. Self-Management Support for Blood Glucose (SMS4BG) is a novel text message-based intervention for supporting people with diabetes to improve self-management behaviours and achieve better glycaemic control and is tailored to individual patient preferences, demographics, clinical characteristics, and culture. This study aims to assess whether SMS4BG can improve glycaemic control in adults with poorly controlled diabetes. This paper outlines the rationale and methods of the trial. METHODS/DESIGN: A two-arm, parallel, randomised controlled trial will be conducted across New Zealand health districts. One thousand participants will be randomised at a 1:1 ratio to receive SMS4BG, a theoretically based and individually tailored automated text message-based diabetes self-management support programme (intervention) in addition to usual care, or usual care alone (control). The primary outcome is change in glycaemic control (HbA1c) at 9 months. Secondary outcomes include glycaemic control at 3 and 6 months, self-efficacy, self-care behaviours, diabetes distress, health-related quality of life, perceived social support, and illness perceptions. Cost information and healthcare utilisation will also be collected as well as intervention satisfaction and interaction. DISCUSSION: This study will provide information on the effectiveness of a text message-based self-management support tool for people with diabetes. If found to be effective it has the potential to provide individualised support to people with diabetes across New Zealand (and internationally), thus extending care outside the clinic environment.<br /

    "Desarrollo del Sistema de Mensajería de Texto para Telefonía Fija"

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    Proyecto de Graduación (Licenciatura en Ingeniería Electrónica) Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. Escuela de Ingeniería Electrónica, 2006.The technological innovation and search of new services is an ideal of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE), which makes the necessity to offer and to enlarge the communication services among its clients. The phone communication is divided in the cellular telephony and fixed telephony. At the moment, the main income of ICE it is given by means of the fixed telephony services. The cellular telephony is taking preference among the clients, therefore it’s necessary to offer new services for fixed telephony. The objective of the project is to develop a new service for the clients of the fixed telephony network, which consists in providing the short text message service (SMS) for fixed lines. In order to standardize the service, in the development of the system, protocols and norms defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have been taken as a reference. The importance of using an international standard resides in the possibility of using commercial terminals (telephones) designed for the SMS. This way, the project is focused in developing the center of messages (SM-SC) and to create the application that manages the protocol. The center of messages was developed in an APEX platform of added value, under a Windows 2000 environment. This platform is connected to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) through a channel E1 with signaling ISDN. In the future, one of ICE’s goal is to allow the integration of the different services in all technologies (mobile and fixed telephony). With this project the SMS is allowed between fixed telephones, the use of the standard leaves a door open to be able to develop the exchange of text messages with the cellular telephony.Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. Escuela de Ingeniería en Electrónica
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