Be Healthy, Be Mobile: A handbook on how to implement mAgeing

Overview

Health information, advice, and reminders delivered through mobile phones can encourage healthy behaviors and help older people to improve and maintain their intrinsic capacity. The WHO mobile health for Ageing (mAgeing) programme has been developed as one of the tools to support the implementation of WHO guidelines on community-level interventions to manage declines in intrinsic capacity – also known as the ICOPE Guidelines. The mAgeing programme can support routine care offered by health care professionals by supporting self-care and self-management.

The newly published Handbook helps countries develop, run, monitor, and evaluate the mAgeing programme within their own contexts, using basic technology common to most mobile phones. Messages within the handbook are based on the latest WHO guidelines on community-level interventions to manage declines in intrinsic capacity (ICOPE guidelines), and built on behavioral change theory. The handbook was developed by the Be He@lthy, Be Mobile initiative, a partnership led by WHO and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and developed in consultation with a wide range of external stakeholders.