We are happy to announce that we start the new public health and MobileCoach-based project read4life with Lungenliga Schweiz.

Substance use is one of the biggest contributors to the health burden in 10-24-year olds. School-based life-skills trainings were effective in delaying or preventing problematic substance use among adolescents, but the implementation and dissemination of scalable and low-cost public health interventions represent serious challenges.

ready4life addresses these issues by providing a 6-month web- and text messaging-based life-skills training to prevent problematic substance use among adolescents. All prospective participants perform a dynamic web-based baseline survey on tablets/smartphones to identify participants and to collect baseline variables. Afterwards, they get an instant and individual feedback for each participant including statistics and graphs. In the following monitoring and intervention phase with a duration of 24 weeks the participants are dynamically guided based on 524 messaging rules and 68 groups with 607 placeholder messages, supported by quizzes, games, intermediate surveys and social web challenges.

The technical basis for this digital health intervention is MobileCoach (www.mobilecoach.eu). The participation closes with a dynamic web-based final survey on the participants smartphone to collect final variables and get feedback on the intervention itself.