Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OCARIoT (smart childhood Obesity CARing solution using IoT potential)

Teaser

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...

Summary

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.

Work performed

The main achievements for this period can be summarized as follows:

- Definition of the technology baseline for the project, the elicitation of user requirements by following a user centric methodology and the definition of the overall technological components that will be part of the OCARIoT architecture.
- Design and implementation of a Proof of Concept for physical activity tracking using the wearables selected for the OCARIoT pilots, and some prototypes for environmental tracking using embedded platforms. Implementation of a message channel using the RabbitMQ, an open source message broker. Specification of the metadata related to health variables necessary to start working in the general model of obesity, combining the medical insight and the defined dimensions established an initial definition of the cut off intervals for each of the variables.
- Design of the DSS framework encapsulating the data needed to formulate the coaching plan’s goals, challenges and rules for health behaviour change in children. Extensive systematic literature review in existing computerised decision support systems and machine learning applications to fight childhood obesity. Exploratory investigation of open-source tools and algorithms for food image recognition toward the accurate and objective identification of meals taken by children.
- Definition of a gamification strategy in OCARIoT for healthy lifestyle. Final design of the app and dashboard prototypes including UI, functionalities, data model and RBAC.
- Preliminary evaluation of the proposed OCARIoT architectures (coming from T2.3) in order to define the standard and protocols for the integration. This includes the design and implementation of API gateway and authorization and authentication mechanisms as a single entry-point for communication between OCARIoT clients (app and dashboard) and microservices . Deployment of the solution using containers tools as Docker, Docker Compose, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes.
- Definition of the validation and assessment process for the OCARIoT platform regarding usability and user experience, including the specification of questionnaires to be used for data collection during baseline measurement and the development of the material to be used during the workshops of the OCARIoT app and the OCARIoT dashboard.
- Feedback analysis of the first-validation stage explored in workshops and focus groups with the different stakeholders (mainly children for the app and families, educators & health professionals for the dashboard).
- Creation of the OCARIoT dissemination plan, identifying the target groups, the type of dissemination messages to be published by the project, and the tools and channels for dissemination. Definition of a canvas for OCARIoT project, which included the project logo, website, newsletter, brochure, flyer and templates for the presentation and documents of the project.

Final results

The innovation potential of OCARIoT to improve the reduction of obesity rate in school-aged children from pilot sites by using the OCARIoT platform can be summarised as:

Health status monitoring with IoT sensors, devices and wearables
- Usage of universAAL IoT platform to enable the acquisition of data and consumption of services by sharing the compatible models (ontologies) that describe the measures and parameters we are interested in. At the moment of pilot implementation, the best IoT/wearable solution available in the market for a massive usage will be included into the universAAL IoT platform implementing the service model represented by its measurement.
- Integration of different heterogeneous IoT sources (including other IoT platforms such as FiWare) to enrich such data within semantic annotations and to infer new knowledge within reasoning algorithms. The awareness of the current systems’ situation and truthfulness of the data will be crucial for ensuring a precise decision making and algorithms performance.
- Enabling a close collaboration between the main actors of the OCARIoT platform, such as children, professional healthcare staff, educational staff and families.

Predictive models for preventing overweight and obesity problems
- Build upon the data, reviews and overall findings both on childhood obesity factors as well as prevention interventions derived from past clinical and technical studies.
- Integrate that historical data on childhood obesity with new evidence derived within the OCARIoT project in order to develop predictive models for preventing overweight and obesity problems
- Predictive models operating on the basis of multi-parametric user monitoring data automatically collected through the OCARIoT’s envisioned IoT infrastructure.

Gamification and user engagement
- Provision of an app specifically for children in order to attract them in its use and with a clear focus on treating obesity health problems.
- Combination of personalised health interventions with a gamification strategy addressing the specific needs of children with overweight and obesity problems.
- Enabling a motivational self-management process adapted to children’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.ocariot.eu.