I’ve written recently about the importance of shifting healthcare systems away from curing us when we’re ill and towards helping us to stay healthy in the first place.

Of course, it’s tempting to think that high tech is the only way for this kind of preventative care to be delivered, and indeed there are a number of mobile and AI based services hitting the market, but the humble text message can be just as powerful.

This was certainly the conclusion of a report I wrote about last year, which found that interventions sent via text message were very effective for areas such as diabetes, weight loss, smoking cessation and physical activity.

Innovation in practice

A good example of how this could work in practice comes from an Indian study whereby researchers sent two text messages per week to over a million people across India encouraging a healthier lifestyle, whether via exercise or healthy eating.

The project is believed to be one of the first to use text messages to reach vast numbers of people across a country as huge as India, and the authors believe it has significant implications for countries all across the income spectrum.

In India alone, it’s estimated that some 66 million people live with diabetes, with 1 million dying from it each year.

Healthier living

The researchers compared the participants with a control group on measures such as their exercise levels and nutritional intake in areas such as fruit and vegetable consumption and fat levels.

When the data was analyzed, it revealed that the participants achieved significantly better results than those in the control group, with something like 40% more participants improving their lifestyle as a result of the text messages.

“Our mDiabetes study suggests mobile health technology is a smart solution and has broad implications for diabetes prevention at the population level in low and middle-income countries,” the authors say.

“This shows the potential for even the most basic of mobile phones to be used as a viable tool to deliver public health messages on a large scale across a diverse population,” they continue. “And you just need a basic mobile phone. This can make an impact.”

The study was part of the wider Arogya World mDiabetes project, which aims to use text messaging to improve health behaviors across India.  The program sees messages sent in up to 12 languages twice a week over a six month period.  Each message was developed by Emory University.  Alongside the text messages is a mobile app, called myArogya, that aims to prevent Indians from developing chronic diseases in the first place.

The success of the mDiabetes project provides us with a telling reminder that we need not use the latest high technology to deliver real results, and with diabetes a particularly large problem in the developing world too, the results hopefully provide significant food for thought.