Mobile Phone Messaging in Health Care - Where are we Now?

Iivari Bäck and Kari M&au

Abstract

Mobile phone text messaging (Short Message Service, SMS) has proved to be a powerful tool for many tasks in health care. It is affordable and instant way for communication between health care personnel and patients, enabling different kinds of control and monitoring applications, improving adherence in self-management of chronic diseases or healthy lifestyle programs etc. However, it is not only textual data that can be transmitted by mobile phone messaging. Multimedia Message Service (MMS) makes it possible to send images, video sequences and audio attached to the message. This has significant potential in health care applications, and an amount of research has been made recently on this field. In this paper, we review the recent development in the mobile phone messaging in health care. Special attention has been paid in the discussion of the current state of the art of text messaging as well as the potentiality of multimedia data that can be utilized by means of multimedia messaging.