Empowering Patients With Diabetes and Their Family Members: Assessing the Impact of Free Informative Mobile Messages

Participants with diabetes will be equally and randomly divided into an intervention group (patients with diabetes and their designated family member) of individualized WhatsApp groups which will include each participant individually and the study coordinator to protect their privacy; regular, 4-5 diabetes educational messages a week for a total of 12 weeks will be sent by noon (around 12 pm) to the intervention group participants. The other group, control group, will receive no text messages throughout this period. After 3 months, participants of the intervention group (patients with diabetes and their family members) will be asked to fill in a postintervention knowledge and practices questionnaire to delineate any marked differences in the context of knowledge and health behaviors. All participants with diabetes of both groups will be asked to recheck the previously noted clinical and laboratory parameters at 12 weeks to evaluate for any changes particularly among the intervention group who will also be asked to fill out a postintervention survey. After 6 months, all patients with diabetes will be asked to recheck their clinical and laboratory values again and members of the intervention group will be asked to fill in the practices section questionnaire again.

This research will additionally include Family Members of patients with diabetes who are involved in their care (cooking, aiding in management, securing/delivering medications, etc.). Family Member Caregivers of participants will be designated/noted by the participants who have diabetes themselves, and they will be included in the study based on their willingness to take part of the study. They will also be sorted into either a control or an intervention group in accordance with which group their relative with diabetes was sorted into, for example, if the patient with diabetes will be designated to be a part of the intervention group, this means that the family member caregiver participant will also be allocated to the intervention group. Our aim is to evaluate their DM related knowledge, personal health practices, their involvement in the care of patients with diabetes, and their impact on the patients' diabetes control before and after the intervention.

One point to note as well is that to ensure equality among groups and for the benefit of the control group participants, the research investigators will be sharing with them the content of the text messages originally shared with the participants of the intervention group by the End of the study.