Mon 4 Jun 2007
“Impoving knowledge and decision support for healthy lifestyles”
Posted by raphael encaoua under preventive care, Health & technology, Medical software
There is an ongoing dream among medical specialists: it is that people can take care of themselves and well manage their health status at any moment. In the following days, I will try to list some very interesting initiatives regarding this matter, namely web based projects for weight control, diabetic control and so forth serving as a lifestyle assistant
Health plus: minus weight!
Health Plus is the first project we will dwell upon. It specialises in fighting against obesity which affects 200 million European citizens and which costs nearly 5% of the healthcare expenses in Europe. This program is organised around two thnigs:
+ an experimental approach through the monitoring of certain populations by creating and diffusing food frequency questionnaires and food registration diaries.
+ a practical approach whereby health plus helps providing personalised nutritional programs to support any user defining and implementing a personal nutrition plan
What is very interesting about Health plus is its action for pediatric nutrition action. In fact, together with the University of Parma, the Health plus program is building up a plateform among children aged from 6 to 12 to asses their eating ande lifestyle habits (though testing effects are quite important when testing young children habits) in order to design and test corrective measures on the long run.
This kind of preventive care actions make particularly sense, as we are not talking about self care but care under the tutelage of the parents with long term benefits as young children will benefit from his early nutritional education. Preventive care systems should really focus on pediatric applications in order to create sustainable results and ease up the diffusion of self care habits.
