African American girls are at a greater risk of obesity than their nonminority peers. Parents have the primary control over the home environment and play an important role in the child obesity prevention. Obesity prevention programs to help parents develop an obesity-preventive home environment are needed. The purpose of this study was to collect formative research from parents of 8-10-year old...

OBJECTIVE This study critically evaluates a new method of collecting frequent data using mobile phones and text messages. Fluctuating conditions such as low back pain (LBP) need frequent monitoring to describe the clinical course in detail and to account for individual and subgroup variations. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING In this multicentre prospective observational study, 262 subjects with nons...

Active travel has many benefits for both individuals and societies. While the number of interventions aiming to promote active increases, it is usually not easy deliver those interventions, identify ‘active components’ them, and/or replicate them. The current paper reports two studies testing that used SMS messages behaviour change techniques (BCTs) based on Control Theory (i.e., goal-setting (...

With the growth of the Internet has come a new method for organizations to advertise and promote their products and services: email marketing. Although some research and common wisdom may suggest that rich, HTML messages generate more click-throughs and purchases, this paper suggests that text-based email marketing can perform as well as HTML messages. The paper reports on the results of a stud...

W examine how firms can create word-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion by designing viral features into their products and marketing campaigns. To econometrically identify the effectiveness of different viral features in creating social contagion, we designed and conducted a randomized field experiment involving the 1.4 million friends of 9,687 experimental users on Facebook.com. We f...

Twitter is a popular microblogging site where users can easily use mobile phones or desktop machines to generate short messages to be shared with others in realtime. Twitter has seen heavy usage in many recent international events including Japan earthquake, Iran election, etc. In such events, many tweets may become viral for different reasons. In this paper, we study the virality of socio-poli...

BACKGROUND More than 34 million people are presently living with HIV infection. Antiretroviral therapy (ART) can help these people to live longer, healthier lives, but adherence to ART can be difficult. Mobile phone text-messaging has the potential to help promote adherence in these patients. OBJECTIVES To determine whether mobile phone text-messaging is efficacious in enhancing adherence to ...