Background: As the use of smartphones and mobile apps is increasing, mobile health (mHealth) can be used as a cost-effective option to provide behavioral interventions aimed at educating and promoting self-management for chronic diseases such as diabetes. Although many mobile software apps have been developed for this purpose, they usually lack a theoretical foundation and do not follow the guidelines suggested for evidence-based practice. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a theory-based self-management app for people with type 2 diabetes and provide an app based on a needs assessment analysis. Objective: This paper describes the development and usability evaluation of a cloud-based and mobile-based diabetes self-management app designed to help people with diabetes change their health behavior and also enable remote monitoring by health care providers. Methods: The development of this mHealth solution comprises 3 phases. Phase I: feature extraction of the Android apps that had a user rating of 4 stars or more and review of papers related to mHealth for diabetes self-management were performed followed by seeking expert opinions about the extracted features to determine the essential features of the app. Phase II: design and implementation included selecting which behavioral change and structural theories were to be applied the app and design of the website. Phase III: evaluation of the usability and user experience of the mobile app by people with diabetes and the portal by health care providers using the User Experience Questionnaire. Results: The developed mobile app includes modules that support several features. A person’s data were entered or collected and viewed in the form of graphs and tables. The theoretical foundation of behavioral intervention is the transtheoretical model. Users were able to receive customized messages based on the behavioral change preparation stage using the Kreuter algorithm. The clinician’s portal was used by health care providers to monitor the patients. The results of the usability evaluation revealed overall user satisfaction with the app. Conclusions: Mobile- and cloud-based systems may be an effective tool for facilitating the modification of self-management of chronic care. The results of this study showed that the usability of mobile- and cloud-based systems can be satisfactory and promising. Given that the study used a behavioral model, assessment of the effectiveness of behavior change over time requires further research with long-term follow-up.

Introduction: Health and lifestyle of women are of great importance in some periods of life, such as menopause. Since postmenopausal women are considered as a vulnerable group of the society, finding a strategy to improve their health seems necessary.Methods: This experimental study with pretest-posttest design was carried out on 200 postmenopausal women between 45 and 60 years old in Ramjerd, Marvdasht, Iran, in 2014. The women who met the inclusion criteria of the study were selected by simple random sampling. The data were collected using demographic information questionnaire, Menopause Rating Scale (MRS), and Walker’s Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile (HPLPII). The data were entered into the SPSS statistical software (version 19) and were analyzed using descriptive statistics, paired t-test, independent t-test, and chi-square test. P-values less than 0.05 were considered as statistically significant.Results: The results of paired t-test showed a significant difference in the mean scores of health promoting lifestyle and MRS in the experimental group (P<.05), but not in the control group (P>.05).Conclusion: Lifestyle education was effective in health promoting behaviors and menopausal symptoms. After the educational intervention, health promoting behaviors increased and menopausal symptoms decreased in the postmenopausal women. Therefore, educational interventions based on health promoting lifestyles can be used as an appropriate strategy to reduce postmenopausal women’s menopausal symptoms and improve their health.

L program. To investigate the interventions through educational program in prevention of cigarette smoking, this paper has used the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM). Materials and Methods: This study is a quasi-experimental study. Two middle schools were randomly selected from male students in Shiraz. Therefore, we randomly selected 120 students for the experimental group and 120 students for the control group. After diagnostic evaluation, educational interventions on the consequences of smoking and preventive skills were applied. Results: Our results indicated that there was a significant difference between students in the control and experimental groups in the means of perceived susceptibility (P < 0.000, t = 6.84), perceived severity (P < 0.000, t = −11.46), perceived response efficacy (P < 0.000, t = −7.07), perceived self-efficacy (P < 0.000, t = −11.64), and preventive behavior (P < 0.000, t = −24.36). Conclusions: EPPM along with educating skills necessary to resist against peer pressure had significant level of efficiency in improving preventive behavior of cigarette smoking among adolescents. However, this study recommends further studies on ways of increasing perceived susceptibility in cigarette smoking among adolescents....

Introduction. Oral health is one of the most important issues in public health. Most educational interventions, as the primary prevention strategy, are focused on increasing information and knowledge and are not usually effective. Therefore, the present study is aimed at determining the effect of theory‐based education on oral health behavior and its psychological determinants including dental health literacy. Method. This randomized controlled educational trial was conducted in two girls’ high schools that were selected by multistage cluster sampling and were divided into an intervention and a control group. Literacy, knowledge, oral health behavior, dental plaque index, and constructs of the protection motivation theory were evaluated before and one month after four training sessions. Finally, the data were entered into the SPSS 19 software and were analyzed using the chi‐square test, independent t‐test, and Mann–Whitney test at the significant level of 0.05. Result. Before the intervention, there was no significant difference between the intervention and control groups regarding the mean scores of knowledge, behavior, and oral health literacy; plaque index; and protection motivation theory constructs. After the educational intervention, however, the means of these variables were significantly improved in the intervention group compared to the controls (p < 0.05). Conclusion. The study findings were in favor of the effectiveness of the theory‐based educational intervention in improving the knowledge, literacy, and behavior related to oral health. Yet, further research is suggested to determine the effectiveness of such an intervention in male students as well as in populations with different socioeconomic and cultural statuses.