Mobile phones | A text a day... | Economist.com

The Economist has a great article in their latest edition entitled Mobile phones | A text a day... - unfortunately only available to subscribers (though the Economist Intelligence Unit has what looks like the same content online for free). This article contains news of great importance to clinicians and informaticians looking for ways to leverage the bewildering array of technical advances and the social transformations they are bringing about. The Positive Technology Journal picked up on it right away, so you may have already seen it, but I think it's important enough to warrant another posting.

The full research report on which the article is based is found online for free at http://www.vodafone.com/assets/files/en/vodafone_policy_paper_4_march06.pdf, but without the Economist's always-concise editorial summarization. The Economist summarizes the study in this way:

Rifat Atun and his colleagues at Imperial College, London, rounds up 150 examples of the use of text-messaging in the delivery of health care. These uses fall into three categories: efficiency gains; public-health gains; and direct benefits to patients by incorporating text-messaging into treatment regimes.

For me one aspect of the report that was especially eye-opening was news of  newly published research by Victoria Franklin and Stephen Greene at the University of Dundee regarding use of this technology in in situ real-time management of diabetes:

The researchers found that the use of text-messaging significantly increased “self-efficacy” (the effectiveness of treatment, measured by questionnaire). More importantly, among patients receiving intensive therapy, the level of haemoglobin HbA1c—an indicator of blood-glucose and hence of glycaemic control—was 14% lower than for those in the control group. Since even a 10% decline in HbA1c level is associated with a reduction in complications such as eye and kidney problems, this is an impressive result.

There is some sad news:

...many of the medical uses of text-messaging have not yet been subjected to clinical trials, because they are so new.

I say 'sad' because text messaging itself is not at all new - it was first introduced in the UK IN 1992 and has been enormously popular among teenagers and young adults worldwide since the late 1990's, especially in developing nations where its lower cost enables a lot more communication per currency unit than voice. It's only the medical uses of text messaging that are new.

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There is a lesson to be learned from this sadness, though.If we want to know where technology is going in the real world, we need to watch the young. They "Get It" before any of the rest of us. Moreover, what they "get" is often outside the commercial realm - blogging, wikis, social bookmarking, and other social networking technologies are only just now being commercialized. I spent too much of the last decade looking at the MIT Media Lab and other academic hotbeds of innovation, and rummaging through the writings of thought leaders, e.g. Esther Dyson's cornucopia of RSS feeds. if only I'd spent a little of that time watching my daughters' use of technology, I'd have seen all this coming.

For these reasons, I'm playing around a lot now with bookmarking tools and other Web 2.0 toys. If I hadn't bought a Nokia 770, I would have bought an iPod and would be figuring out how to hack it in my idle hours. I'm listening closely to ancient IT wisdom from folks like Art Kleiner and John Seely Brown, not to mention Shahid Shah, but also listening to folks like Amy Gahran and Dick Hardt, and getting my MSI degree in Human-Computer Interaction at Michigan where I am studying social networking in a course given by Lada Adamic, Croation prodigy diva of social networking theory. Next time around on this merry-go-round, I wouldn't mind catching the Gold Ring, but at the very least I want to see it as it comes round the bend.