MessageSpace: a messaging system for health research

Mobile Health (mHealth) has emerged as a promising direction for delivery of healthcare services via mobile communication devices such as cell phones. Examples include texting-based interventions for chronic disease monitoring, diabetes management, control of hypertension, smoking cessation, monitoring medication adherence, appointment keeping and medical test result delivery; as well as improving patient-provider communication, health information communication, data collection and access to health records. While existing messaging systems very well support bulk messaging and some polling applications, they are not designed for data collection and processing of health research oriented studies. For that reason known studies based on text-messaging campaigns have been constrained in participant numbers. In order to empower healthcare promotion and education research, this paper presents a system dedicated for healthcare research. It is designed for convenient communication with various study groups, feedback collection and automated processing.