Content guidance for mobile phones short message service (SMS)-based antiretroviral therapy adherence and appointment reminders: a review of the literature

ABSTRACT

Mobile phones are increasingly being used to support health activities, including the care and management of people living with HIV/AIDS. Short message service (SMS) has been explored as a means to optimize and support behaviour change. However, there is minimal guidance on messaging content development. The purpose of this review was to inform the content of SMS messages for mobile health (mHealth) initiatives designed to support anti-retroviral therapy adherence and clinic appointment keeping in resource-limited settings. PubMed, OvidMedline, Google Scholar, K4Health’s mHealth Evidence database, the mHealth Working Group project resource, and Health COMpass were searched. A request to online communities for recommendations on message content was also made. 1010 unique sources were identified, of which 51 were included. The information was organized into three categories: pre-message development, message development, and security and privacy. Fifteen of the publications explicitly provided their message content. Important lessons when developing the content of SMS were: (1) conducting formative research; (2) grounding content in behaviour change theory; and (3) reviewing proposed content with experts. Best practices exist for developing message content for behaviour change. Efforts should be continued to apply lessons learned from the existing literature to inform mHealth initiatives supporting HIV/AIDS care and treatment.

KEYWORDS:

• HIV
• biotechnology
• SMS
• adherence
• infectious disease
• mobile phone

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the respondents of the mHealth Working Group, mHealth Student Group and HAART Adherence listservs. We would also like to thank the researchers and implementers who took the time to answer questions regarding their research and/or provide messaging content: Daniel Beck and Bhupendra Sheoran (Oregon Reminders), Jennifer Uhrig, Allison Bailey Hughley, Amy Styles, Karen Ingersoll, Jessica Haberer, Nathan Georgette, Carol Golin, Nicolette Naidoo, Thomas Odeny and Lawrence Mbuagbaw. Finally, we would like to thank Marzieh Mirhashemi, Shreya Kulkarni and Heather Cole-Lewis for their close readings of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Geolocation information

By nature of our methodology, our literature search was not restricted to any particular geolocation and included research papers from various countries across the world. A listing of these countries can be found in Supplementary Table.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, under grant UL1 TR001064 (NNK); the Lifespan/Tufts/Brown Center for AIDS Research (AMT, MRJ), under grant P30 AI042853 and the National Institutes of Health under grant 1K23AI097010-01A1 (SYH).