The history of REMIND
In 2010, Marion Sumari, started working at KCRI as a post doc researcher in the PanACEA consortium. During the first years of her work, she and the IT administrator, Kennedy Ngowi, started thinking about combining their expertise of health research and ICT into mhealth studies. With the great mentorship of Prof. Dr. Rob Aarnoutse, they were able to write a number of proposals focusing on digital adherence tools for both PLHIV and TB patients.
The REMIND-studies in KCRI started in 2014 when a small pilot study was done among people living with HIV and TB patients to see whether using an internet-enabled medication dispenser, the KiReTaMo study. These studies followed on the expertise of the PI on adherence studies, the expertise of KCRI on TB studies and the ICT expertise of the co-PI.
As we found that using such a dispenser is feasible, but also costy, we decided to conduct another pilot study whereby we reminded pregnant and breastfeeding women to take medication through SMS, the REMIND-pregnancy study.
Based on these two studies, we conducted a three-armed trial among people living with HIV to investigate the effect of a dispenser (Wisepill) and SMS on adherence to treatment, the REMIND-HIV trial. This study was finalized in December 2020 and lead to a number of publications.