Using Your Smartphone to Lose Weight (and other interesting things you can do with a smartphone)

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From the May 5, 2011  Cornflower blog item (The Blog of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Greater Midwest Region)

Today in Chicago, it is currently 48 degrees at 10:00 am.  Not exactly beach weather.  However, it will be soon time to take off those winter jackets and replace it with t-shirts and suntan lotion.  So, did you know you can use your smartphone to help you lose weight? (Not saying you need it! You look marvelous!) Duke University researchers are using Android smartphones and wireless weight scales for a weight loss study.  It’s not just that you connect with a scale wirelessly and it adds your weight to a chart on your phone; the app on your smartphone will keep track of your weight and depending how it is trending, send you messages.  Hopefully they aren’t messages like “lay off the cookies, Max!” Because I love cookies too much.  Anyway.  This article came out a few days ago and you may find it interesting: http://www.imedicalapps.com/2011/04/duke-researchers-android-phones-bluetooth-weight-scale/.

Sort of on the same wavelength about getting messages from your phone – there are a growing number of services that will communicate with you to remind you of appointments, to take medicines, or in the case above, maybe even give encouragement.  Some examples:

• Text4Baby (especially with Mother’s Day just around the corner!), http://text4baby.org/
  • Indiana University Health, Texting Teen Moms Proves to be a Convenient Source for Support
• Weight Management Text Messaging, http://www.muschealth.com/weightlosstools/weightmessage.htm
• CDC – Mobile at CDC, http://www.cdc.gov/mobile/
• Summa Health System (OH)- Baby’s First Text Message, http://www.summahealth.org/common/templates/article.asp?ID=18612
• ER Wait Times (IL), http://www.edward.org/body.cfm?id=1443 and one from CA, http://blog.cep.com/bid/38007/Hospital-launches-emergency-department-text-messaging-program

There is a Health Literacy Out Loud Podcast on this topic: http://www.healthliteracyoutloud.com/2011/04/26/health-literacy-out-loud-57-texting-important-health-messages/

Other developments:

• In Denver, Co, the hospital group Denver Health has teamed up with Microsoft and EMC on a project to send patients text message reminders about upcoming appointments in a diabetes program that aimed to help patients better self manage their condition.  They ask patients to text in their daily glucose readings.  They hope that this will improve condition management, reduce admission rates and reduce costs.  Read more about this project.
• Getting teens and tweens to be more complaint with eczema treatments with texting: http://www.skincarephysicians.com/eczemanet/texting.html

For more clinical research see the following:

• Text messaging for enhancement of testing and treatment for tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus, and syphilis: a survey of attitudes toward cellular phones and healthcare.
• Assessing the effectiveness of text messages as appointment reminders in a pediatric dental setting.
• Content of text messaging immunization reminders: What low-income parents want to know.

There’s more where these came from in PubMed.

What is your organization doing with mobile technologies? Does your hospital have ER wait times available via a mobile device? What about appointment reminders?

P.S. Don’t forget about the NLM “Show Off Your Apps” Contest! http://challenge.gov/NIH/132-nlm-show-off-your-apps-innovative-uses-of-nlm-information

P.P.S. (or is it P.S.S.?) Don’t forget about all of the mobile sites and apps available already from the NLM: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mobile/

PubMed Mobile Beta & Helpful Links on Searching PubMed for BioMedical Information

From the National Library of Medicine (NLM)  Technical Bulletin article posted March 17 2011

PubMed® Mobile Beta provides a simplified mobile friendly Web interface to access PubMed***. PubMed Mobile includes the same basic search functionality and content as Standard PubMed; that is, all search terms and fields work similarly (see Figure 1).

 

Figure 1: PubMed Mobile homepage.

Simply enter your search in the search box and click “Search” (see Figure 2).

The inital (Summary) display includes the article title, first author’s name, journal title abbreviation, and year of publication.

Figure 2: PubMed Mobile Summary search results.

Click “Free Full Text” or “Review” on the Summary search results page to filter your results. Click “Next” to go to subsequent search result pages.

Click the article title to display the Abstract format (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: PubMed Mobile —
beginning of the Abstract format.

Not all data provided on the Standard PubMed Abstract format are included (for example, MeSH® vocabulary); to see complete data use the link to Standard PubMed.

Related Citations display below the abstract. On the abstract page, click “Previous” or “Next” to navigate to other citation abstracts. Click the “Back to results” link to redisplay the Summary search results (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: PubMed Mobile —
tail end of the Abstract format.

A link to Standard PubMed is available at the bottom of all PubMed Mobile pages.

PubMed Mobile does not include specialized search pages, such as Limits and Advanced search, or added features, such as My NCBI, Clipboard, or LinkOut/Outside Tool. To use these and other PubMed features, display your retrieval in Standard PubMed via the link at the bottom of the screen.

By Kathi Canese and Edward WelkerNational Center for Biotechnology Information

***PubMed is the largest indexer of the biomedical literature in the world. It can be rather intimidating to search the first few times because there are many options to refine your search in order to get tailored relevant results. Believe me, it is worth the effort!

If you would like expert personalized PubMed search advice, please do not hesitate to contact (preferably call ahead!) a  reference librarian at your local academic, medical, or public library.

Many academic and medical libraries offer some degree of personalized reference service to the public. These services are largely offered by professionals with a Masters degree in Library Science who have many years experience providing relevant research articles and other resources to a wide variety of health professionals and others. They enjoy teaching both formally and informally.

Please feel free to email me (jmflahiff at yahoo.com) with any questions. I would be happy to work on a question for up to 2 hours and reply within 3 days. No charge.

Here are some PubMed tutorials and guides

• PubMed Tutorial (National Library of Medicine)
• PubMed Online Training [Quick animated tours, Webcasts, detailed tutorial, Webcasts, and more] (National Library of Medicine)
• PubMed MeSH searching (sullivanlibrary.wordpress.com)
• PubMed Search Help Items (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• PubMed Toxicology Subset Streamlines Biomedical Searches in the Professional Literature (jflahiff.wordpress.com

Related Articles

• PubMed Health Provides Disease and Treatment Information for Consumers (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Download PubMed Search Results Into a Spreadsheet with FLink (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• How to obtain free/low cost medical articles in medical and scientific journals (jflahiff.wordpress.com)

HighWire Launches Six Mobile Web Sites in Collaboration with the American Heart Association

 

From the HighWire news release

Stanford, California – November 29, 2010 HighWire Press is pleased to announce the launch of the HighWire Mobile Web Interface for six American Heart Association journals. The Mobile Web Interface is a publication website optimized for the small screen of smartphone devices. This is the first of a suite of mobile products from HighWire, which includes an iPhone and iPad full text app as well as a RSS- driven iPhone app and full text Amazon Kindle support. Users accessing sites through an iPhone or Droid smartphone will be detected and automatically sent the HighWire Mobile Web interface…