mHealth Platform and Architectures to Provide Nutritional Guidance to Children

Abstract

Obesity and eating disorders in children are major problems worldwide. To promote their future well-being, it is important to educate children and teenagers about healthy lifestyle choices. Mobile technology offers many opportunities for helping to prevent health problems; however, the sole use of stand-alone applications is insufficient to improve childrenâ??s health awareness because children require proper orientation from adults. In this paper, we present a mobile platform intended to provide nutrition guidance to children and architectures for implementing this platform in an elementary school environment. These architectures provide data capturing and user interfaces that are especially suited for children, and they permit adults to send and receive notifications and messages to improve results.

The Intensity Use of mHealth Apps and its Relation to Nutrition Knowledge, Healthy Eating Self-Efficacy, and Positive Body Image

“…Using mHealth applications might benefit those who wish to enhance their overall health [29][30]. Specifically, nutrition-related mHealth applications might benefit adolescents' health by increasing their nutrition knowledge and preventing obesity [31,32].…”

A User-centered Design Approach to Near Field Communication-based Applications for Children

“…Vazquez-Briseno et al (2013) introduced a smartphone application with the support of NFC technology and QR codes. It offers nutrition guidance to promote healthy diets for children and prevent obesity [19]. The main page of the application presents three buttons, which are the NFC tag scan button that reads the content of the tag attached to food; the second button, which provides a set of food groups; and the last button, which presents and explains the Eat Well Plate.…”

“…The Nutrition Guidance application developed by Vazquez-Briseno et al (2013) provides textual alerts and notifications, but this is unsuitable for children [19]. Children who fall in the age range between 2 and 4 years old are not able to read text; thus, text alerts are not appropriate for them.…”

“…Children who fall in the age range between 2 and 4 years old are not able to read text; thus, text alerts are not appropriate for them. Using multimedia like sound, videos, and pictures to deliver the message is a better method to notify children and keep them interested [19]. After thorough review, it can be concluded that developers failed to take this into consideration as 42% of the applications studied do not provide visual and aural feedback (as shown in Table I).…”

Development of a Mobile Health Architecture to Prevent Childhood Obesity

“…La arquitectura considera dotar a los alimentos que los niños pueden consumir con etiquetas NFC (Near Field Communication) o códigos QR (Quik-Response) conteniendo la información nutrimental del producto. Esta información básicamente consiste en: calorías, cantidad de sodio, azucares y grasa, almacenada en una estructura JSON como se describe en [11]. Esta información se muestra a los niños en un teléfono inteligente o una tableta digital utilizando las aplicaciones de salud móvil diseñadas para tal fin, las cuales se describen en la sección III.B.…”