"Doctor in the Pocket" Aims to Increase Exercise in Overweight Youth

Wanna bet on the outcome?

An innovative mobile technology program called KNOWME Networks that shows promise in combating childhood obesity is being tested by Donna Spruijt-Metz, MFA, PhD, from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles.

"Pediatric obesity is a huge problem in this country and worldwide," said Dr. Spruijt-Metz. "We've been remarkably unsuccessful at combating it. . . . To change this behavior, we have to be revolutionary," she told a packed session on health monitoring and health outcomes at the 2010 mHealth Summit. The problem, according to one graph shown by Dr. Spruijt-Metz, is that kids essentially sit down at age 11 and don't get up again.

Her revolution involves technology, specifically mobile technology, and includes a set of wearable wireless sensors that measure physical activity, stress, location in time and space, body fat, and a number of other factors. Dr. Spruijt-Metz developed this tool in conjunction with collaborators — Shrikanth Narayanan, PhD; Murali Annavaram, PhD; Urbashi Mitra, PhD; and Gaurav Sukhatme, PhD — from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Data are transmitted in real time to a secure server for storage and analyses. The focus of the technology — called KNOWME because it really knows the child — for these first studies is to develop a Mobile Body Area network that monitors obesity indicators in minority youth.

"We don't see this technology as replacing the physician or health educator, but possibly as strengthening it," said Wendy Nilsen, PhD, moderator of the session and a health scientist administrator in the National Institutes of Health's Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, Bethesda, Maryland, in an interview with Medscape Medical News. "If you see that you have a 'doctor in your pocket,' you may feel more connected." And that connection might lead to behavioral change.

I'll take the "it won't work" side of the bet.

Foolishness.