Design and sampling
thalassemia, behavioral and mental disorders, diabetes
THALASSEMIA, DIABETES
The present quasi-experimental study was carried out as a pretest–posttest design with a control group from August 2019 to February 2020. The study population were the thalassemia patients with active medical records who were referred to Shahid Beheshti Hospital in Yasuj in 2019. At the beginning of the trial, there were 135 thalassemia patients. Considering limited research population, only 99 patients with thalassemia were eligible for the study.The inclusion criteria were age (16 years old and above), being literate, and having a smartphone application on which the app could be installed (for the intervention group). The exclusion criteria were patients with behavioral and mental disorders and other underlying medical conditions such as diabetes.A total of 99 eligible individuals participated in the study and completed the informed consent form. They were randomly assigned to groups A (Smartphone App Intervention), B (lecture Intervention), and C (Control) through the block randomization method. Different block sizes were created by the block randomization process. The individuals were divided into groups at random, with block sizes of 3, 6, and 9. In this strategy, the intervention and control groups each had the same number of samples.