Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, University of Pavia, Italy.
Kotuko srl, Milan, Italy.
Int J Med Inform. 2023 Sep;177:105140. doi: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2023.105140. Epub 2023 Jul 8.
Obesity is increasing in the pediatric population, and it represents an important risk factor for the life-long development of several diseases. Although health promotion represents the mainstay of obesity prevention and treatment, lifestyle modification programs are often unsuccessful.
The purpose of this article is to introduce the V-care app, a mobile health platform specifically developed to offer effective interaction and support young people in a long-term obesity treatment, combining different strategies to maximize the results of the lifestyle modification program and minimize the possibility of dropouts.
The V-care app is based on a conventional client-server architecture, but novelties of our approach are the involvement of families in the lifestyle modification program, and the design inspired to psychological/behavioral change theories, with the aim of raising the chance of patients' compliance to the program. V-care implements a goal-based behavioral intervention, providing specific feedbacks according to the patient's performance. A pilot usability and acceptability study was performed on a sample of thirteen children aged 6-12 years, using a questionnaire with a 5-points Likert scale to evaluate eight system features, identified as essential requirements based on the analysis of strengths and weaknesses of similar systems in literature.
The pilot study highlighted very high rate of overall friendliness and perceived utility evaluation, while some critical issues emerged especially for the chatbot section, which may be due to the novelty of the technology. The positive evaluation of the design choices is confirmed by the average score greater than 3 for all the questions.
The V-care app represents a digital innovation in the pediatric healthcare, and it could be introduced in children's primary healthcare nationwide, with the aim to offer an intervention program for controlling and preventing childhood obesity.
儿科人群中的肥胖症正在增加，它代表了几种疾病终身发展的重要危险因素。尽管健康促进是肥胖预防和治疗的主要手段，但生活方式改变计划往往并不成功。
本文旨在介绍 V-care 应用程序，这是一个专门开发的移动健康平台，旨在为长期肥胖治疗的年轻人提供有效的互动和支持，结合不同的策略来最大限度地提高生活方式改变计划的效果，并最大限度地减少辍学的可能性。
V-care 应用程序基于传统的客户端-服务器架构，但我们方法的新颖之处在于让家庭参与生活方式改变计划，以及受心理/行为改变理论启发的设计，旨在提高患者对计划的依从性。V-care 实施基于目标的行为干预，根据患者的表现提供具体的反馈。我们对 13 名 6-12 岁的儿童进行了一项试点可用性和可接受性研究，使用 5 分制李克特量表的问卷评估了八项系统功能，这些功能被确定为基于文献中对类似系统的优势和劣势的分析的基本要求。
试点研究突出了总体友好性和感知有用性评估的非常高的比率，而一些关键问题主要出现在聊天机器人部分，这可能是由于技术的新颖性。所有问题的平均得分均大于 3，这证实了对设计选择的积极评价。
V-care 应用程序是儿科医疗保健领域的一项数字化创新，它可以在全国儿童初级保健中引入，旨在提供控制和预防儿童肥胖的干预计划。
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