Design of an Interactive Text Messaging Platform for Adolescent Intervention

Interactive technology such as text messaging and other features of smart phones and feature phones provides an appealing way to conduct research with today’s tech-savvy adolescents. This presentation introduces and describes the design of a computerized system for managing an interactive text messaging platform that is suitable for teen research. Design decisions and high level approaches and their justifications will be presented along with lower level technical details of the software and server technology. The framework that was designed, implemented and deployed for this text-based approach relies on popular Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) computer server technology and the Tropo Cloud-based platform for text-enabled applications, with design direction taken from several well-studied software engineering design patterns.

The web server that hosted the texting application software was configured using the widely-used LAMP configuration, which is designed for efficient and cost-effective web servers, enabling a wide variety of power web-based applications. The text-based software that drives our study was implemented in the PHP programming language, which is widely used for web-based application development. PHP was selected for its broad adoption, availability of example programs, and support within Tropo, the text messaging platform that was selected for this project. The server was configured to use a high level of security to insure that data integrity was maintained. The overall design of the text messaging software system was engineered using three well-known design patterns that describe the structural, behavioral and concurrency aspects of the system.

The Short Message Service (SMS), or text messaging service, component of the system was implemented using a commercial Cloud-based Application Programmer Interface (API) called Tropo. Tropo provides web-application developers an API for designing software that supports voice and SMS communication in a variety of popular programming languages. The Tropo system enables unlimited, free use of the text-messaging platform for web-applications during the development and testing phase and a cost-effective pricing structure during the production phase of a project.

Application design began with an algorithm definition phase, during which appropriate design patterns were identified and implemented and test programs were developed to experiment with the features of the Tropo platform. Subjects were entered into the study on a rolling basis, resulting in subjects being in various states of the study simultaneously. Text message sequences were sent over four days, during an individually approved time window. Message interactions were handled asynchronously based on individualized interactions with each subject, with all interactions captured in a transaction log for data redundancy and security purposes. Upon completion of the four day sequence, subjects were sent reminder text messages at days 23, 29 and 30 after they entered the study, encouraging them to complete an online follow-up survey.