Leveraging health and wellness platforms to understand childhood obesity: A usability pilot of FitSpace

摘要

The rates of childhood obesity are at an all-time high, both domestically and around the globe. In an effort to stem current trends, researchers have looked to understand the components of effective and sustainable interventions. Although obesity interventions have often focused on a single lifestyle factors such as activity or nutrition, recent focus has shifted to a broader set of interventions that address multiple aspects of a child's life concurrently. Yet, despite promising outcomes, an understanding of what drives the success or failure of an intervention for a specific child is not yet well understood. To this end we have designed FitSpace, a web-based health and wellness platform designed to help understand how goal setting, activity, and nutrition patterns are tied to a child's social-demographic profile and their overall success in achieving sustainable healthy behavior. The work presented here represents the first step in our research, detailing a usability pilot study of the platform run in partnership with a local high school.