Children obesity treatment support with telemedicine

Abstract

Obesity is considered an endemic within the whole European continent, just as in most part of the developed world. Obesity poses an increasing risk, childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years. To assess the impact of obesity we need to take into account the severity of the problems that obesity might cause, as risk is usually interpreted as the product of probability of occurrence and severity. In the last few decades, increased occurrence of several morbidities was casually linked to obesity. Recently health problems targeting children have increasing trends in well developed countries. Our research is focusing on obesity related health problems in children, and our offered ICT solutions enables healthcare service providers to remotely monitor patient's (children's) activities and weight. The solution also helps to assign workout programs to the children according to the collected sensor data. The used workout programs base not only on widely used sport activities (etc. running or gymnastics), but cover non-conventional sport activities like playing with interactive game consoles at home. The system contains an Android based DAQ (Data Acquisition Device), sensors and a server side portal, which collects all measured patient information in the data center. The solution combines existing; self developed client and server side applications and frameworks, and commodity sensor solutions. The main goal of our work is to adapt the already existing monitoring solution to children. Kids behave and use such monitoring environments differently due to their different perception and knowledge level. They need different GUIs; they live different lifestyle as elderly patients. The communication lines of the system are compliant to the EU and national regulations. The developed system was tested and a prototype system was installed successfully in a real environment. Sensor data acquisition on the personal mobile device enables both end-users and care givers/professionals to provide better and more effective health monitoring and facilitate patient's treatment. The paper describes the internal architecture of the software solution and its main functionalities.