Sending Text Messages Helps Fight Asthma Attack in Children

A recent finding from Georgia Institute of Technology states that sending text messages to children suffering with asthma, enquiring about their symptoms and providing knowledge about their condition, helps in improving their health.

The study says that by frequently enquiring about symptoms and giving information about asthma through text messages, there was a great improvement in the person's pulmonary functioning. There was also a better understanding of their condition within four months.

"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," study leader Rosa Arriaga, senior research scientist in the College of Computing's School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, said in a press statement.

According to the study, more than 5 million children in the U.S. are affected by asthma, with a total of 17.3 million individuals.

To prove their hypothesis, the researchers divided 30 asthmatic children from a private pediatric pulmonology clinic in Atlanta into three groups. The control group did not receive any text message, one group received text messages on alternate days, and another group received text messages every day. The participants were between 10-17 years and had a mobile phone.

Over a period of four months, the intervention groups received and responded to SMS messages 87 percent of the time. The researchers noticed an improvement in clinical outcomes after analyzing the patients during their follow-up.

The research, "A Text Message a Day Keeps the Pulmonologist Away", was presented April 30 at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2013 in Paris.