OB CITY–Definition of a Family-Based Intervention for Childhood Obesity Supported by Information and Communication Technologies
OB CITY gives you a ready-made, gamified parent-coaching app for childhood obesity that you can lift and adapt.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors built a smartphone app called OB CITY. It coaches families to treat childhood obesity.
Parents watch short videos that show healthy habits. Kids earn game points for trying the habits. A BCBA checks data and gives feedback.
What they found
This paper only shows the plan. No kids used the app yet, so no results are given.
How this fits with other research
Boydston et al. (2023) and Zhou et al. (2018) already proved that app-based parent training works. They saw big skill jumps in autism families.
Dallery et al. (2021) showed phone rewards can lift adult smoking abstinence to 89 %. OB CITY copies the reward idea for kids’ food choices.
Lee et al. (2022) built short online modules parents liked, but did not measure child change. OB CITY adds the next step: built-in data tracking so you can see if weight moves.
Why it matters
You can copy the OB CITY pieces today: tiny videos, point store, daily weigh-ins sent to you. The platform is free to adapt. Try it with any telehealth case where family habits need to change.
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Join Free →Film one 30-second video of a healthy snack prep, drop it in your current parent app, and add a point each time the parent sends a photo of the child making it.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Childhood obesity is becoming one of the 21st century’s most important public health problems. Nowadays, the main treatment of childhood obesity is behavior intervention that aims at improve children’s lifestyle to arrest the disease. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have not been widely employed in this intervention, and most of existing ICTs systems are not having a long-term effect. The purpose of this paper is to define a system to support family-based intervention through a state-of-the-art analysis of family-based interventions and related technological solutions first, and then using the analytic hierarchy process to derive a childhood obesity family-based behavior intervention model, and finally to provide a prototype of a system called OB CITY. The system makes use of applied behavior analysis, affective computing technologies, as well as serious game and gamification techniques, to offer long term services in all care dimensions of the family-based behavioral intervention aiming to provide positive effects to the treatment of childhood obesity.
IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, 2016 · doi:10.1109/JTEHM.2016.2526739