Research
Seed Grant Profile
100
2009-2010 Program
Investigating the Effect of SMS Technology on Asthma Management for Pediatric Patients and their Healthcare Providers
In this study we will investigate whether asthma awareness and management is enhanced through a low cost SMS mobile technology for pediatric patients that have their own cell phones. Thirty patients will receive free unlimited texting in return for participating in a six month study. They will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions 1) query, where they will be asked to respond to questions about their asthma symptoms, 2) query and content, where they will be queried about their asthma and also given information that counters asthma myths or 3) control, they receive no messages from their pulmonologist. Outcome measures of interest will include patient confidence of disease management (locus of control), patient medication adherence, patient clinical indices (including validated chronic disease control measures), outpatient visits, urgent Visits, hospitalizations, need for rescue medication therapy, and disease improvement (as estimated by pulmonary function and medication burden). In addition, we will provide a physician "dashboard" interface that helps to highlight experimental participants' query data that indicates that they "may need attention." Underlying this dashboard approach will be some algorithmic intelligence in the Georgia Tech service that implements agreed-upon heuristics for alerting the physician of negative changing status of each patient.
Investigators: Rosa Arriaga (GT, School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing), Randall Brown (Georgia Pediatric Pulmonology Associates and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta)