Fighting flab with your PDA
Published: 03 May 2002 07:31 BST
Singapore is known for its love of technology, great food, and a youth obesity level that's troubling the island-state's health officials.
Not surprisingly, a Singapore team has developed a handheld-based solution that puts a nutritionist, personal trainer and therapist into the chubby hands of Singapore students.
Aimed at primary and secondary schools in Singapore, the HealthTrek Information Tracking System includes 50 Sony CLIE S360 monochrome-screen handhelds with 16MB of storage, HealthTrek software, training for teachers, helpdesk support and two years of hosted database access.
Data entry is fairly straightforward -- after a student keys in his food choice into the Palm OS handheld, where over 2,000 dishes of Italian to Vietnamese origin are stored, the carbohydrates, proteins and other nutrients of what he or she is about to wolf down appear onscreen.
A calorie burn calculator will let the user know if a serving of Thai green curry, a Big Mac or Chinese fried noodles will tip him into the danger zone, when balanced against how much exercise he's had. About 800 types of physical activity, from simple walking to rock climbing, are listed.
Another portion of the program lets the student record how sad, dull, energetic, stressed, depressed or anxious he or she feels at the moment.
Once a week, the handhelds are synched, and the data uploaded to a central database which generates progress reports. The entire system is priced at $19,000.
The solution was developed by the National Institute of Education (NIE), a government-run teacher-training institute, Sony, IBM and International Application Solutions, an IBM subsidiary.
At a press conference today, the developers said aggregated data will give educators a snapshot of a student's health and state of mind, how diet and exercise affects mood, and vice versa. This information will be useful in planning a school's physical education curriculum or even the food sold in the canteen.
"The data is useful for populations that are healthy as well as those who may be at risk...It can be pooled to provide a composite picture of the pupils, teachers or employees' overall health profile and harness more effective intervention strategies," said Leo Tan, director of NIE.
Work on the flab fighting solution began last year at a cost of $276,000. The developers hope to make the product available to the public in a year, but could not provide a cost estimate.
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