Clinical trials

Many adolescents living with HIV have difficulty taking their medicine on time, which can make it less effective and affect their health. This study will test whether sending reminder text messages, combined with small rewards like school supplies, hygiene kits, or sports items, can help adolescents take their HIV medicine regularly and stay in care. Each adolescent will choose a daily habit or routine to link to their medication. We will compare two groups receiving messages and rewards to a group receiving standard care to see which approach works best. We will also ask participants about their experience with the messages and rewards. The aim is to find a simple and effective way to help adolescents living with HIV stay healthy and in care.

Despite the evidence of the prevention and control measures of tuberculosis (TB), it still has an impact on the health, social, and economic aspects of the population. Specifically, tuberculosis in children and newly diagnosed TB cases show there is current transmission of TB; to reduce this transmission and to attain the end TB strategy, preventing household TB transmission plays a great role. However, initiation and completion of TB preventive therapy (TPT) among close contacts of index TB patients are suboptimal. Some of the identified factors of low TPT initiation and completion are insufficient patient education, inadequate understanding of TPT, health professionals' perception, parental knowledge, and belief. The digital health intervention is currently being studied as a suggested health intervention that improves the utilization of health care services, including treatment adherence. A systematic review shows that TB treatment outcomes improved with the use of patient education, counseling, text reminders, and digital health technologies. However, other literature indicates controversial results, including our systematic review result, which identified that video directly observed therapy and text message (digital intervention) have no significant effect on TPT completion. In addition, the studies are scarce; therefore, this study aims to assess the effect of video-based education intervention combined with text message reminder (digital health intervention) in improving the initiation and completion of TPT among close contacts of drug-sensitive pulmonary TB patients in South Ethiopia. The study hypothesizes that digital health intervention for close contacts of index drug-sensitive pulmonary TB patients will lead to higher TPT initiation and completion rates than standard care.