An mhealth system to support health education aiming the treatment of obesity in adults

The purpose of this article is to present an mHealth system based on the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change, on persuasive technologies and on mobile design heuristics for touch screen devices to promote healthy habits and obesity reduction. The research was descriptive and explanatory with applied nature and quantitative approach. Regarding technical procedures, a quasi-experimental research was characterized. A pilot study was conducted with a sample of 58 users, organized into two groups with different levels of intervention. Group 1 (G1) had interaction via the developed application and Group 2 (G2) had interaction via the developed application plus social networks. The metrics applied to assess the results were: weight, waist and hip reduction, as well as application usage time. In both groups, a reduction was observed in the measures considered in the intervention. This research allows several developments, such as the motivation of users through gamification and the encouragement through social networks. In addition, due to the potential amount of user data, several studies of Data Mining for Big Data can be performed with the information obtained by the system. The idea is to keep the system free, open source, with an anonymous data usage policy in order to maintain users' privacy, but open for further research.