V-care: An application to support lifestyle improvement in children with obesity

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.