The obesity epidemic is the primary cause of recent increases in heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other diseases that place an untenable strain on healthcare and public health. One of the primary behavioral causes, i.e. dietary intake, is a behavior that science has had little success in understanding, much less affecting. Current behavioral science suggests that family eating dynamics (FED) have high potential to impact child and parent dietary intake and obesity rates. In contrast to traditional obesity related approaches that focus on dietary intakes (e.g., what and how much is being eaten), FED based approaches focus on family mealtime and home food environment (e.g., who is eating, when, where, with whom, interpersonal stress) for modeling behavior and providing feedback that has potential for successful behavior modification. This poster briefly presents M2FED, an integrated system for monitoring and modeling FED. The system is under development, and it consists of in-situ and wearable sensors, and smartphones that collect synchronized real-time FED data used to iteratively develop dynamic, contextualized FED models.
['Donna Spruijt-Metz', 'Kayla de la Haye', 'John Lach', 'John A. Stankovic']
M2FED: Monitoring and Modeling Family Eating Dynamics: Poster Abstract