Childhood and adolescent obesity is a major global and European public health problem.  This is a community for teachers and students that would like to get engaged in a series of voluntary spontaneous activities, data collection methods and discussions with the eventual aim to address the issue of obesity and to provide researchers with much needed data, enabling them to influence policy makers to adopt new strategies on the issue of childhood obesity.

Technological achievements in mobile and wearable electronics and Big Data infrastructures allow citizens (students and teachers in our case) to get involved in such data collection processes, enabling them to reshape policies at a regional, national and European level. Using a specifically designed platform will allow the quantification of community patterns through Big Data and offer a series of sensors to the participating schools. In this context students and teachers become researchers. Furthermore, through the collection and sharing anonymized data, and collaboration with experts, students will receive feedback regarding their dietary and physical activity behavior.

The approach builds on the idea that collecting, storing, processing and analyzing huge amount of data that describe everyday dietary, sleep and activity behavior of large number of children, in combination with diverse extrinsic data describing the conditions of their environment (urban, natural, school, family and social), produces radically new evidence for designing counter-obesity policies.

You can find further information about the related EU funded project, HERE