Lifestyle evaluation system to support health education

A computer-based system for evaluation of one's lifestyle was designed so that public health nurses could use it for health education to improve a patient's lifestyle and to prevent lifestyle-related diseases. The Lifestyle Evaluation System (LES) is a computer program that works on a personal computer. The LES is consist of four parts; inputting personal data, answering the questionnaire, showing the result and getting health check up data. The questionnaire includes 40 questions regarding diet, smoking, drinking, physical activity, rest, social activity and health care activities, based on Breslow's seven lifestyles. The result offers participants' lifestyle evaluation in forms of values, graphs, tables and messages. Evaluation values are deviation value, rank, BMI and standard weight. The LES also offers participant's periodic health check data, average data derived from all residents' data, and past results of LES so that public health nurses are able to use these for health education. The health check data is obtained from another database stored on floppy disks. The participants input data by themselves and get result immediately. The interactive style is effective in raising interest in health education.