Abstract
Excessive weight and obesity are worldwide problems that are related to a variety of health issues. Several methods have been utilized recently to educate people and communities about topics related to nutrition behaviors. How can we develop educational mechanisms for healthy behaviors, focusing on a target group and their context? To reply to this question we developed a ubiquitous software called Ubinut, with the objective of sending messages through mobile devices. The software sends messages supervised by a nutritionist. These messages are related with specific contexts. To test the software we conducted a feasibility test with 40 random university students. During the trial period we received nearly 700 evaluations of the messages. With our first findings we developed a second version of the software including geofencing, called Geonut. The main contribution of this work is the launching of healthy messages when the users are more likely to make poor nutritional decisions.
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Notes
- 1.
These times are culturally specific. For example, in Chile, lunch is most commonly eaten at 1:00 p.m., whereas in other countries it might be eaten either earlier or later. Also, lunch is the biggest meal in Chile, rather than dinner.
- 2.
The users can set this source in the preferences section of the application.
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Besoain, F., Perez-Navarro, A., Ojeda, F., Reyes-Suarez, J.A. (2015). Promoting Healthy Nutrition Behavior Using Mobile Devices and Ubiquitous Computing. In: Cleland, I., Guerrero, L., Bravo, J. (eds) Ambient Assisted Living. ICT-based Solutions in Real Life Situations. IWAAL 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9455. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26410-3_9
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