Child obesity is the major pediatric public health concern, affecting around 224 million school-age children in the world. Its prevalence has tripled in many European countries since 1980, increasing in an alarming rate. Childhood obesity already affects more than one in three school-aged children in Brazil, Greece and Spain. Childhood is an important period for forming healthy behaviours in order to reduce obesity inequities. OCARIoT will promote the improvement of eating and physical disorders and also the prevention of the obesity onset for children (between 9 and 12 years old), the main objective of OCARIoT is to provide an IoT-based personalised coaching solution guiding children to adopt healthy eating and physical activity behaviour. The IoT network will allow us to observe child activity patterns of daily living, health evolution, physiological & behavioural parameters and environmental data.
The general objective is broken down into several objectives.
STO1: Integrate, secure and real-life test several IoT sensors, devices and wearables to capture data about eating behaviour, activity patterns, and physiological signals for enabling a smart assisted living environment that supports a Healthy and Active Lifestyle targeting childhood obesity.
STO2: Create obesity models by correlating behavioural patterns (for eating and physical activity mainly) detected on specific recordings of human generated signals to the risk of the development or aggravation of obesity.
STO3: Provide a Personalised IoT-based obesity-care (nutritional and sport) guidance System and IoT-based interventions to help and train children to improve their eating and activity behaviour by detecting subjects at risk for developing obesity or eating disorders and offering them enhanced monitoring and guidance in order to prevent further disease progression.
STO4: Develop the OCARIoT platform to enable a bi-directional and easy communication between users and the system.
STO5: Provide the integrated platform in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution validating in two pilots in Europe and one pilot in Brazil with children between 9 and 12 years-old.
The main findings after piloting confirm the OCARIoT ecosystem is capable of assessing the behaviours of children, motivating and guiding them towards achieving personal behavioural goals. Although it is demonstrated that the environmental status can directly influence our health, at this first stage it is still not possible to relate the data collected to the quality of health of children in relation to their physical activities due to problems related to COVID-19, as the data were collected in their absence in schools. Finally, the feedback provided by families and children revealed that the OCARIoT solution created a high positive impression and satisfaction from UX and technology acceptance perspective. However, the OCARIoT solution needs further refinement to become a commercial tool, and that has been considered in the exploitation and business model.
