Developing an application for guardians to monitor the health of obese children in Thailand

Abstract

This research aim to develop a new system Health Monitoring Application of Obese Children and examine the perspective of guardian and other stakeholders on the system. The data flow diagram was designed using children personal data, energy intake and nutrition intakes collected from the guardian as well as information and function needed in the program collected from stakeholder including child, guardian, teacher, and nutritionist. Using the data flow diagram, the study successfully created the new system, Health Monitoring Application of Obese Children, to monitor energy intakes and nutrition intakes in obese children as well as information about children growth rate and conditions. The decision support system was applied to calculate and provide food and health education for overweight children in the system. The purposed guidelines for suitable nutrition and health education are listed on the web base including the details of user data, food intake, body weight, waist circumference and underlying disease. The log details on all data including details of user activity and improvement condition of users were provided on the web based system A survey was conducted to determine the stakeholder's perspective on the results of the evaluation of the processing efficiency of the system and the user specific usage. The results of the evaluation indicated that this web application linked the data correctly and alerted or even sent a warning when there was some missing data. This result also revealed that the stakeholders were interested in this application as it received a high level of satisfaction.