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A Decade of Tech, Part 10

Pat Hartman July 13, 2023 No Comments

As we have seen, electronic screens as a genre are both wonderful and dangerous. Childhood Obesity News has reported on examples of both kinds.

In “globesity” news, in 2018, an extensive article about the obesity/electronic screen connection was issued from Dubai, stating that in the United Arab Emirates, approximately nine out of every 10 children were spending hours every day interacting with their smartphones, tablets, and other electronic gadgets. A survey of at least 1,000 children in that country and Saudi Arabia revealed that they practiced a “balanced usage of mobile devices for both leisure and learning activities.”

At the same time, it was learned that parents viewed obesity as the most pervasive children’s health issue. Close to 70% of the parents realized that there was an obvious link between obesity and ubiquitous screen usage. Asma Ali Zain wrote,

As per the survey, more than half believe that watching videos, playing video games and using electronic devices have educational benefits… Three in five said that children should be taught to use technologies from a young age, and one in three actively encourage their children to use these devices.

Parents believe children are more likely to spend time taking photos, listening to music or browsing the Internet. (Browsing the Internet and listening to music are more popular in the UAE as compared to KSA).

The surveyed parents tended to push back against the social media concept, and believed that two out of three of their children were not signed up with one of those apps. Of course, the concept of keeping kids (or adults either) away from their screens, anywhere at any time, is more aspirational than pragmatic.

In the view of Omnibus Research head Kerry McLaren, it seemed pretty obvious that most parents could point to a definite link between technology and obesity. While it seems that they didn’t feel much could be done to cut down screen time, they were quite conscious, in theory anyway, of the importance of a healthful diet. One of the factors affecting obesity is the area’s severe heat, which precludes spending a lot of time outdoors and makes vigorous exercise unattractive.

A mother who was interviewed admitted to occasionally turning off the WiFi “to force her kids to take a much needed break,” and no doubt other parents resorted to the same trick at times.

Like many other countries, the UAE was adversely affected by the COVID crisis. In 2018 the childhood obesity rate had been 12%, and by 2020 it was over 17%. However, according to pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Asma Deeb, probably about one-third (around 33%) of children in the Abu Dhabi metropolis are overweight.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Gadgets causing obesity among kids: Survey,” KhaleejTimes.com, 07/19/18
Source: “Tackling childhood obesity, one family at a time,” ssmc.ae/news, 07/25/22
Image by Damian Zech/CC BY 2.0

Everything You Know About Screens Is Wrong

Pat Hartman July 12, 2023 No Comments

“You laugh at my horse, you buy my horse.”

How’s that for an old saying? The thing you scorn today, at some future time you will want for your own. It’s a cruel irony. In the struggle to reduce childhood obesity, one of the basic tenets has been the necessity to get kids away from electronic screens.”Stop playing those video games and sharing TikTok dance videos and flirt-texting with that girl or boy,” we have insisted. “Get up and move around,” we have urged.

The mantra has been, Screens = Bad. And now, it’s all different. Now we want everybody to have screens, to access their health monitoring and weight-loss apps. What a pointed example of flip-floppy reversal!

The COVID era in its intense phase exposed the “digital divide” as a nationwide crisis. In 2020, SFGATE’s Editor-at-Large Andrew Chamings wrote,

Across the country, approximately 15-16 million K-12 public school students, or 30% of all public K-12 students, live in households either without an internet connection or device adequate for distance learning at home.

This left almost one-third of homebound children at risk of “significant learning loss.” (Incidentally, it was also found that a surprising number of American teachers — estimated at hundreds of thousands — lack adequate tools and connectivity in their homes.) One study found that a hefty proportion of students were limited to doing their “distance learning” via their parents’ smartphones. That situation creates a whole set of problems, because the grownups need their phones to help them make a living and pay the rent, whether they are in the house or at an outside job.

The pandemic and the consequent sudden demand for home-based tutoring demonstrated that, for better or worse, an awful lot of kids just don’t “do” screens. As a previous post mentioned, numerous families are in no way equipped to facilitate their children in distance learning. A lot of American kids don’t have access to a computer, or a table to set it on, or a domestic environment conducive to learning. Not surprisingly, they tend to live in communities that are underserved in many ways.

No matter how smart and motivated kids are, they can’t do the work if they don’t have the gear. Lacking hardware, the most comprehensive and cleverly-designed program is useless to them. Even if by some miracle they obtain a laptop, tablet, or cell phone, they are super-vulnerable to thievery.

Nobody is available to teach them the basic usage of the device. They lack the know-how and the money to get it connected to the wired world. Their parents lack the time and the tech savvy. In a piece called, “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both,” New York Times reporter Deb Perelman wrote, “Remote learning has already widened racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps because of disparities in access…”

Policy cannot be guided by “people with cushioning.” Unless it works for everyone, policy is baloney. Without the technology and machinery to support it, even the most brilliant program or application is baloney too.

Wouldn’t it be great if every school district in the country had a fully-functioning plan for online education? Perelman wrote,

Successful online learning will require much more than taking a traditional lesson plan and doing it in front of the computer. Good online teaching takes expertise and skill… and it means that teachers should be designing their own lessons, rather than districts outsourcing education to for-profit companies.

In the name of both justice and common sense, Shayla R. Griffin, Ph.D., insists that all teachers need state-of-the-art equipment and full support to do their jobs, as much as all families need computers and internet access.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Report: 1 in 4 Calif. kids don’t have adequate internet access to learn from home,” SFGate.com, 06/29/20
Source: “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.,” NYTimes.com, 07/02/20
Source: “Schools Aren’t Opening. We Have to Pay Parents to Stay Home with Their Kids.,” Medium.com, 07/29/20
Image by Boston Public Library/CC BY 2.0

Two Worrisome Trends

Pat Hartman July 11, 2023 No Comments

Picture this: 745,000 subjects. If that is not an impressive number, then what is? Although these individuals are from 41 different countries, according to a study published in the journal Child and Adolescent Obesity, an awful lot of them have one thing in common:

More and more teens all over the world are underestimating their own body weight. [T]his trend could undermine, or render increasingly ineffective, ongoing public health interventions…

Researchers from the University of Luxembourg analyzed 16 years’ worth of data to learn how thoroughly the kids are fooling themselves. When young people underestimate their weight, lead author Doctor Anouk Geraets told the media, it is a matter of concern, because “they may make unhealthy lifestyle choices.” More accurately, they will continue to stick with the same unhealthy habits they have been practicing all along.

A BWP, or Discrepancy in body Weight Perception, goes one of two ways. A person has a self-image of either being skinnier than they are, or fatter. When someone believes their body to be less corpulent than it actually is, that self-deception can be dangerous. On the other hand, the belief that one is disgustingly fat can lead to horrific eating disorders that are astonishingly difficult to cure.

But apparently, there is less reason than ever before to worry about anorexia, because while people’s overestimation of their own weight status happens less often, their self-underestimation has ominously increased.

It’s a world-beater

This research was undertaken as part of a WHO collaborative study of International Health Behavior in School-Aged Children. The scholars reached several main findings, including, “Correct weight perception increased over time among girls but decreased among boys.” Males can more easily fool themselves into believing they are in good shape. This ties in with a problem experienced by the U.S. military establishment, which is still overwhelmingly male.

The Army, for instance, needs about 130,000 new recruits per year. Out of all the 17- to 24-year-olds in America, 11% are military-ineligible strictly due to being overweight. At the end of 2022, it was estimated that the next fiscal year would come up about 10,000 recruits short. The deficit actually reached nearly 15,000. The news gets worse:

However, the Department of Defense’s most recent figures show that an astonishing 77 percent of Americans of prime recruiting age would be ineligible for military service… Over three-quarters of American young people are ineligible due to some combination of factors, chief among them obesity.

The COVID pandemic did not help to rectify matters. Between early 2019 and mid-2021, in the Army alone, nearly 10,000 active-duty soldiers became obese. Before that crisis, about 18% of soldiers were obese, but by 2021 the percentage grew to 23%:

Overweight and obese troops are more likely to be injured… The military loses more than 650,000 workdays each year because of extra weight…

[T]hree-quarters of Americans aged 17 to 24 are not eligible for military service for several reasons, including extra weight. Being overweight is the biggest individual disqualifier…

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “OK with obesity? Fewer teens see themselves as overweight, survey reveals,” StudyFinds.org, 07/04/23
Source: “Addressing childhood obesity also supports US military readiness,” TheHill.com, 12/14/22
Source: “Pandemic pounds push 10,000 U.S. Army soldiers into obesity,” USNews.com, 04/02/23
Image by Dept. of Defense/Public Domain

A Decade of Tech, Part 9

Pat Hartman July 10, 2023 No Comments

What could be more technical than Analytics, one of the forces by which society is ruled? Like so many other branches of science, Analytics can be good or bad. From a 2015 news story, how does this sound?

[B]rands can identify those children most reactive to food and drink marketing and target them specifically with their Facebook advertisements.

The Irish Heart Foundation published a report called “Who’s Feeding the Kids Online?” that outlined the methods used by advertisers, on behalf of manufacturers, to fly under parental radar and spread the junk food gospel. Did it work? You bet. For instance, journalist Danny Gridley pointed to “a French Coca-Cola campaign, where Facebook ads accounted for 2 percent of marketing cost but 27 percent of the increase in sales.” The writer remarked, “All we can hope is that Facebook can find a way to use its powers for good and not evil.”

A 2018 article also pointed a finger at Facebook, as having been “embroiled in controversy with Cambridge Analytica, and cited modern technology in general as having developed “a bad habit of letting people down.” A powerful influencer named Martha Lane Fox who sits on the boards of several media giants spoke at an industry conference where she urged businesses to take more responsibility for considering unintended consequences and especially for practicing more transparency.

At the time, the coalition of technology and advertising was under fire for contributing to childhood obesity, and the idea of placing restrictions on the junk food and sugar-sweetened beverage industries was being seriously discussed. “Make responsible tech the new normal,” was the phrase that writer Michaela Jefferson chose for the piece’s title — even if that meant implementing some degree of regulation.

Characterizing childhood obesity epidemic as public health epidemic, a program was designed to evaluate the importance of caregivers, especially parents, and also to confront the problem of parents being less engaged during the summer, and of school not being in session. And since kids are heavily involved with texting, social media and other technology anyway, why not take advantage of it?

Importantly, the potential for such technology approaches to serve as theoretically sound behavior change intervention strategies, either singularly or as part of a multi-component approach, for self-monitoring with immediate feedback, as well as an opportunity for support, behavioral nudging, and positive reinforcement, has rapidly emerged.

The experimental program seems to be kind of a virtual camp, encouraging parents to engage their children in the same type of nutrition, education, recreation, and fitness program they would partake in if away at an actual camp. Parents liked the “quick and easy access to healthy habit suggestions” and the non-invasive nature of text messaging. One takeaway was that “this work is critical for informing changes to technology-based caregiver engagement strategies to be tested in future interventions.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Facebook And Childhood Obesity Linked In Latest Report,” TheDailyMeal.com, 06/16/16
Source: “Martha Lane Fox: ‘We’re trying to make responsible tech the new normal’,” The-Media-Leader.com, 07/19/18
Source: “Feasibility and acceptability of technology-based caregiver engagement strategies delivered in a summertime childhood obesity prevention intervention: results from an internal pilot of the Camp NERF (Nutrition, Education, Recreation, and Fitness) study,” BiomedCentral.com, 09/27/18
Image by fsse8info/CC BY-SA 2.0

A Decade of Tech, Part 8

Pat Hartman July 7, 2023 No Comments

Currently offered for sale (US$4,499.00) is the domain name vBloc.com, described as “a perfect fit for your business or personal project.” If, that is, your business or personal project is the manufacture of an appetite suppression gadget suitable for implantation in the body of a severely obese person who within the past five years had tried and failed to shed weight by other methods. Under its formal name, the Maestro Rechargeable System, the device was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2015. It included some components implanted in the body and others located outside.

The internal components include a rechargeable pulse generator (also called a neuroregulator disc) which delivers electrical signals to nerve electrodes. The electrodes are placed on the trunks of the vagus nerve in the abdomen and two electrical leads connect the electrodes to the pulse generator. The external components include a transmit coil, mobile charger, and clinician programmer.

Installation would involve minimally invasive surgery, and the externally-worn battery would be on for up to 12 hours per day, and need a weekly recharge. Its purpose was to block signals along the vagus nerve, telling the brain that the stomach was empty or full, and also to “decrease calorie absorption through lower digestive enzyme secretion.” It was said to allow patients “to address obesity without any restrictions to food intake and any adjustments to their lifestyle.” This is difficult to envision. Could a person really eat unrestrictedly and be okay, as long as they had a gadget? Wouldn’t the presence of an ever-open port necessitate some lifestyle changes?

Aaron Mamiit wrote,

Functions of the vagus nerve involve the enabling of several mechanisms in the human metabolic and gastrointestinal systems, including stomach expansion, stomach contraction, gastric acid release, stomach content release into the small intestine, digestive pancreatic enzyme secretion and the sensations of both hunger and fullness.

Patients who received over 12 daily hours of vBloc therapy “achieved more than 25 percent average excess weight loss over a period of 12 months.” These numerical statements can be tricky. If a person was judged to be 40 pounds too heavy, that would mean they lost maybe 10 pounds over a year, which does not sound so impressive when phrased that way. In 2012 during testing, it was estimated that the system would cost the patient $15,000.

One trial involved 503 Australian and American subjects, of whom 90% were women. The researchers found that clinically significant weight loss…

[…] was related to hours of device use. Post-study analysis suggested that the system electrical safety checks (low charge delivered via the system for electrical impedance, safety, and diagnostic checks) may have contributed to weight loss in the control group.

They concluded that weight loss was not impressively greater among the participants than in the control subjects. In another trial concerning morbidly obese patients, 162 received the working device and 77 were implanted with a fake, and they all had weight management education. The report concluded that:

[…] the use of vagal nerve block therapy compared with a sham control device did not meet either of the prespecified coprimary efficacy objectives, although weight loss in the vagal block group was statistically greater than in the sham device group.

On the positive, side, the device proved to be safe and well tolerated by the implantees. A couple of years later, vBloc therapy reportedly “continues to result in medically meaningful weight loss with a favorable safety profile through 2 years.” In a manufacturer-conducted study, the participants with the working device lost almost 9 pounds more in a year than those in the control group who had sham devices.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “vBloc.com,” PerfectDomain.com, 05/07/23
Source: “Enteromedics Maestro Rechargeable System,” RxList.com 10/14/19
Source: “FDA approved a device that blocks your hunger pangs,” Mashable.com, 01/15/15
Source: “Appetite Pacemaker: Here’s How this Weight Loss Implant Works,” TechTimes.com, 01/15/12
Source: “The EMPOWER study: randomized, prospective, double-blind, multicenter trial of vagal blockade to induce weight loss in morbid obesity,” NIH.gov, November 2012
Source: “Effect of reversible intermittent intra-abdominal vagal nerve blockade on morbid obesity: the ReCharge randomized clinical trial,” NIH.gov, September 2014
Source: “Two-Year Outcomes of Vagal Nerve Blocking (vBloc) for the Treatment of Obesity in the ReCharge Trial,” NIH.gov, January 2017
Image by Beth Scupham/CC BY 2.0

A Decade of Tech, Part 7

Pat Hartman July 6, 2023 No Comments

In 2018, Fitbit came out with a new device meant to encourage healthful movement in young people. “It can automatically track kids’ activity, remind them to get up and move, and set activity goals for them to meet.” Designed especially for children age 8 and older, it was priced at $100. The various parts would track their steps and their active minutes, and remind them to get up and move. There were encouraging messages and activity goals and rewards. It also kept track of sleep time. The ad copy said,

Parents will be able to check kids’ activity and approve kids’ friend requests in the app, as well as set limits on what their kids can see.

By 2022, several different kinds of Fitbit gadgets were available for the younger crowd. The offerings included models for younger kids, for older kids, devices available at a discount, and “feature-rich” options with “all the bells and whistles” including the ability to report on blood oxygen levels and skin temperature variation.

Parents were told that, thanks to the device, they would be aware of when to reward their children for making credible efforts, and be able to pit children against each other in friendly competition. The devices were designed to protect children’s privacy from everyone except, of course, their parents. The instructions also came with various caveats:

The Parent view in the Fitbit app lets you navigate between your view and your kid’s view to check on their activity and progress. It also provides you with a means to manage who your children connect with and what information they see on the OLED display… These wearables only focus on fitness tracking so lack safety tracking functionality that can be found in certain other devices. The most important thing to know is that Fitbit does NOT gather location tracking data from your child.

An interesting twist in the product field, from SunderlandEcho, was a type of pedometer that orchestrated a “virtual trek.” In 2015, students from 30 different primary schools were issued pedometers that kept count of their steps and then, thanks to a specialized website, translated the distance they had covered into an imaginary walking tour.

The system marks out the steps on a map along the route of the Jarrow March to London and then around Europe, taking in all the major cities, including Paris and Berlin.

Students from the school that chalked up the most “travel” miles were rewarded.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Fitbit’s new $100 fitness tracker is made especially for kids — here’s how it works,'” BusinessInsider.com, 03/14/18
Source: “Best Fitbits for kids & teenagers – guide, recommendations,” GadgetsAndWearables.com, 12/02/22
Source: “Thousands take part in ‘virtual’ trek across Europe,” SunderlandEcho.com, 07/03/15
Image by ucniss/CC BY 2.0

A Decade of Tech, Part 6

Pat Hartman July 5, 2023 No Comments

This series looks at some of the ways in which technology has impacted obesity (and vice versa) over the past ten years or so. In 2014 there was news from Chicago about a pilot program for 6th-grade students, called “Healthy School Meals Realized through Technology (SMART) Schools.” The preliminary steps began with qualitative research done by Canyon Ranch Institute “that included focus groups and interviews with students, parents, teachers and staff.” The intention was to figure out how to help people of all ages boost their levels of health literacy.

A school nutrition software company called A+ Café helped to develop technology that enabled preventive medicine experts to know what each child chose for breakfast and for lunch. This information was then matched up with the children’s weight gains or losses. The goal was to design a way to track the kids’ food choices, for the purpose of tailoring individualized reports. One of the principal investigators, associate professor of preventive medicine Brad Appelhans, Ph.D., told the press,

The overall goal of this project is to develop a technology-based system to track student food choices in the school setting and be able to provide this information to parents and teachers along with some evidence-based strategies to help children adopt a healthy lifestyle. This could be a valuable component of future school-and-family-based child obesity interventions.

Members of the cafeteria staff, equipped with touch-screen monitors, scanned the students’ ID cards to record each food item they picked out. Every week, each child’s comprehensive report was forwarded to the grownups. It would reveal things like the nutritional and caloric values of the various items, and also make recommendations toward more suitable future choices.

Technology was used with the end goal of tailoring educational materials according to individual needs and inclinations, and to guide the children and parents to develop more effective self-management skills.

As always, there were ideological differences, as some Americans objected to the snitch factor. Did these kids, in their final year of elementary school, have any say in the matter? Is there a rights issue?

Around the same time in Mississippi, where 43% of the kids were overweight or obese, pediatric endocrinologist Jessica Sparks Lilley, MD made known her opinion of an interactive health-coaching application marketed by Weight Watchers (newly christened WW):

I’ve personally used the WW app with the desired outcome of weight loss, and found the program much easier to follow than others, with long-lasting lessons of incorporating more fruits and vegetables, for instance.

In a state with such a paucity of health literacy, anything that works at all sounds pretty good, and some things raise even higher expectations. And advice alone “doesn’t provide the structure that families seek.” They are asked to keep food journals, and ponder the entries and the possible relationship to unwanted body weight.

Dr. Lilley expected the medical community to be excited about the app, which utilized a program called Kurbo that had originated at Stanford University. She characterized the program as well-researched and successful, and as “a free app for children over age 8 that gives support for weight loss and healthy food choices, with coaching available for a fee” which apparently was $70 a month, a lot for Mississippi. But in a backlash both swift and severe, critics castigated it for not being person-centered, and…

[…] social media was ablaze with expletive-laden missives against the perception that children were being told by society that their size determined their worth.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Two Chicago Cafeterias to Use Technology to Create a Healthy Eating ‘Report Card’ on Students’ Food Choices and Eating Habits to Help Prevent Childhood Obesity,” Newswise.com, 08/21/14
Source: “Weight Loss App for Kids: Backlash ‘Swift and Severe’,” Medscape.com, 08/27/19
Image by Uncle Saiful/CC BY-ND 2.0

Happy Independence Day!

Pat Hartman July 4, 2023 No Comments

Happy Independence Day! Be safe!

We will return with our regular post tomorrow.

Image by jitphoto/123RF Stock Photo.

A Decade of Tech, Part 5

Pat Hartman July 3, 2023 No Comments

Ten years ago, electronic health records were making the news. Professionals were excited about the opportunity to intervene more “aggressively,” though that might not have been the most thoughtful or helpful choice of words. Programmed alerts of various kinds were welcomed by practitioners and patients alike. But in the realm of pediatric obesity, researchers could not help noticing that computers were not really doing a good job keeping track of whether the electronic systems actually helped children to reduce their weight, or at least slow down their rates of gaining pounds.

Also, it was noted that some families were not ready or able to adjust their lifestyles in order to adapt to electronic systems. At the same time, some doctors also found it difficult to change their ways. An uncredited writer reported,

To prepare physicians for these new EHR tools, the researchers provided a one-hour training class…. individual training, as opposed to group classes, could improve performance. “The alerts led to significant but not dramatic improvements,” said Ulfat Shaikh, lead researcher, pediatrician and director of Healthcare Quality at the UC Davis School of Medicine. “We believe any electronic record intervention must be combined with other approaches.”

That, in itself, should not come as a surprise. Grownups are like children in many ways, and for both groups, some learning is absorbed better if the contact is individual and personalized. This is why, for instance, pharmaceutical corporations customarily sent attractive sales reps from office to office to tell doctors one-on-one about the benefits of their products.

To measure whether EHRs enhance practice, the researchers added obesity-related alerts to health records at the UC Davis Health System’s outpatient clinic, which cares for about 12,000 children each year. The alert — highlighted in bright yellow on the screen — warned physicians when a patient’s weight hit the 85th percentile, which is considered “overweight.”

The doctor would then be electronically guided through a series of steps that had been found helpful in addressing weight issues. Patients and their families were to be educated about “diet, exercise, screen time and other behaviors associated with obesity.” These discussions were to be documented. Appropriate lab tests would be recommended, in addition to referrals to dietitians, and follow-up contacts would be scheduled.

As a result, the proportion of children with diagnoses of overweight or obesity increased from 40% to 57%. More kids were sent for lab tests for diabetes and abnormal blood levels of cholesterol and fat. Recommendations for follow-up appointments almost doubled. And yet, for some reason, referrals to dietitians did not increase. Was this necessarily a bad thing? Because, as Dr. Pretlow says, pretty much everybody already knows about calories and nutritional guidelines, and if they had not started following helpful eating practices yet, this might not be enough of a nudge to make them change their ways. It became apparent that referrals were needed not to dietitians, but to counselors, social workers, and cognitive behavioral therapists.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “UC Davis Study Offers New Insights Into Controlling Pediatric Obesity,” Benzinga.com, 01/29/14
Image by rodgerspix/CC BY 2.0.

A Decade of Tech, Part 4

Pat Hartman June 30, 2023 No Comments

Yes, let’s talk more about the combination of technology with the search for successful interventions to reduce childhood obesity. (Apparently, the notion of eliminating it altogether has come to seem like something from the land of fairy dust and unicorns.)

In the realm of pediatrics, as well as in other areas, the innovations of telemedicine, telehealth, and even telepsychiatry have steadily become more prominent.

Back in 2014, a platform called CloudVisit was created to organize the scheduling of video appointments among people in different locations: “health care providers, patients, and families at home and at local facilities.” A successful weight management program involves participation from a number of experts — not only pediatricians, but dietitians, movement specialists, psychologists, statisticians, and more. And it has been shown that personal interaction works wonders.

Reality intervenes

But for various reasons, families cannot continue to bring children to physical locations forever, and fate provides other barriers to the perpetuation of intense, frequent personal contact. Organizations that were formed to deal with childhood obesity run out of money. “Cost-effective” is a very important phrase. The eventual goal has to be finding ways to “easily transition patients from in-office care to long-term weight management success.” As proponents of telemedicine point out, it can make a significant difference to rural and other underserved populations.

As CloudVisit President and CEO Daniel Gilbert phrased it, “Continuous care is easier, completely private, and significantly more efficient for the providers and the patients. Online wellness programs can improve long-term compliance and help patients maintain weight management goals.” One crucial facet of doing things the electronic way is that the care providers have to figure out how to monitor and influence compliance in the home, without being intrusive or bossy to a degree that causes attrition.

BrainWeighve

Now, in the present day, to truly appreciate how far the concept of long-distance helping has advanced, check out the BrainWeighve App User Manual. Here is a brief excerpt explaining how it works:

The app helps you deal with both immediate and ongoing difficult life situations and resulting eating urges. You enter your difficult life situations in the app’s Dread List, which helps you identify these situations, and then the app helps you to create Action Plans for each one.

This should stop the build-up of overflow nervous energy in your brain, and the displacement mechanism, which causes you to overeat, likewise should stop firing. For in-the-moment, immediate stressful situations with eating urges, you should tap the Rescue button. The Rescue area asks you what is bothering you the most in your life, at that moment, and then helps you come up with an Action Plan.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Pediatric Telemedicine Discusses Overcoming Childhood Obesity,” BroadwayWorld.com, 04/03/14

A Decade of Tech, Part 10

Everything You Know About Screens Is Wrong

Two Worrisome Trends

It’s a world-beater

A Decade of Tech, Part 9

A Decade of Tech, Part 8

A Decade of Tech, Part 7

A Decade of Tech, Part 6

Happy Independence Day!

A Decade of Tech, Part 5

A Decade of Tech, Part 4

Reality intervenes

BrainWeighve

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources