Cell Phones as Public Health Tools While the syringe has often
been the visual image most closely associated with public
health, in just a short time the cell phone could be the go-to
icon.The Yale School of Public Health has announced a novel,
two-year clinical trialthat will use participants’ cell phones,
and the text messages those cell phones transmit, to develop
mobile phone-based health interventions that target specific
peer groups. The trial is being funded by the National
Institutes of Health. The participants in this first trial are
young men ages 18 to 25 who have agreed to allow their cell
phones to be tracked by Yale researchers. Each participant’s
physical location will be tracked through global positioning
systems, and a computer program will register all incoming and
outgoing calls and text messages, which will not be shared
outside the trial. The clinical trial will have three social
networks which will each start with a single person and then
recruit his friends, and then their friends, unti