Abstract
Educating teenagers about nutrition and promoting active lifestyles is essential in reducing the long-term health risks and one idea to achieve this is by using mobile applications. Previous studies showed that the existing mobile applications have similar functionalities, such as intervention with questionnaires, and the use of gamification techniques to improve interactiveness. However, unlike our study, some studies are not validated and verified by healthcare professionals. Additionally, this study intends to promote the interaction between the teenagers and the medical communities. In this study, we analyze the benefits of the proposed mobile application, which features monitoring of physical activity, daily tips and curiosities, questionnaires, and gamification through earning points. Most of the teenagers were satisfied with the physical activity monitoring and found the tips, curiosities, and weekly questionnaires useful. The study started with 26 teenagers from two schools in the center of Portugal that would use the mobile application for five weeks. Still, at the end of the study, only 7 teenagers finalized the study. The decreasing number of teenagers in the study was affected by the lack of social interaction caused by the pandemic situation. During the period, the mobile application would engage the users with notifications on nutrition and physical activity, challenges concerning the number of steps and calories they would have to spend, and questionnaires related to the curiosities and suggestions from the previous week. We used Fisher’s test to investigate the relationship between the assessment obtained in the responses to the questionnaires, and the adoption of healthier eating and sports practices. In summary, participants were satisfied with the mobile application and experienced some improvements in diet and habits.
Highlights
Inadequate knowledge about nutrition and physical activity causes bad habits in young people.Teenagers are spending a lot of hours in sedentary activities, practicing a low level of physicalHealthcare 2020, 8, 315; doi:10.3390/healthcare8030315 www.mdpi.com/journal/healthcareHealthcare 2020, 8, 315 activity [1,2]
Given that mobile applications are used to control lifestyle habits [33,34], and that young people use mobile devices [35] and mobile applications [36] frequently, a systematic review was carried out to study which mobile applications are most used by people who use devices with the Android operating system and which are related to diet, nutrition, health, and physical activity [37]
It was found that the inclusion of advertising in the project increases adherence to this type of mobile applications by young people, and the sessions held in selected schools increased the acceptance of the mobile application
Summary
Inadequate knowledge about nutrition and physical activity causes bad habits in young people.Teenagers are spending a lot of hours in sedentary activities, practicing a low level of physicalHealthcare 2020, 8, 315; doi:10.3390/healthcare8030315 www.mdpi.com/journal/healthcareHealthcare 2020, 8, 315 activity [1,2]. Teenagers are spending a lot of hours in sedentary activities, practicing a low level of physical. Obesity is defined as a chronic, complex, and multifactorial disease that is unfavorable for health. It is characterized by an excessive increase in body fat, resulting from the imbalance of caloric expenditure and energy intake [7]. This imbalance is favorable to the development of several metabolic complications, namely insulin resistance, which leads to hyperglycemia, dyslipidemia, hypertriglyceridemia, low levels of high-density lipoprotein, and hypertension [8]. The best way to spend calories is through physical activity, which better influences energy balance and weight control [9]
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