AFINA-te
A Healthy Lifestyle Information Website, Online Food Diary and Exercise Log
Directly Towards Children
Nuno Guimar
˜
aes
1
, Vera Ferro-Lebres
2
and Jos
´
e Carlos Ribeiro
1
1
Faculty of Sports, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
2
School of Health, Polytechnic Institute of Braganc¸a, Braganc¸a, Portugal
Keywords:
Children, Exercise, Nutrition, Online, Website.
Abstract:
Childhood obesity is according to the World Health Organization one of the most concerning problems today.
Educating children to a healthier lifestyle is a difficult task due to the lack of interest or concern that they
demonstrate. The interest that children have in technology and the time they spent online in games or simply
surfing the web may be seen as an opportunity to instill knowledge about healthy eating and healthy lifestyle.
There are already several online health counseling websites but it seems to exist a lack of such platforms
directly towards to children. Afina-te website is an online platform that aims to monitor and educate children
to a healthier lifestyle through the exposition of information, interactive applications and educational games.
It is also capable of provide feedback about what users eat and the exercise they practice. This paper describes
the development and resulting health counseling website.
1 INTRODUCTION
Childhood obesity is a global problem with great con-
cern for public health. The body mass index (BMI) is
used to define overweight and obesity amongst chil-
dren and teenagers. When the BMI is higher or equal
to 95
th
considering age and gender then it is defined as
obesity. When is between 85
th
to 94
th
it is considered
overweight (Barlow et al., 2007). The World Health
Organization (WHO) pointed out that in 2012, 44 mil-
lion children were overweight (WHO, 2014). In Por-
tugal, recent studies from the Directorate-General of
Health (DGS) concluded that approximately 35% of 6
to 8 year old children were overweight (DGS, 2013).
Obesity can also lead to several health problems in
short and long term periods (Daniels, 2009). To pre-
vent such problems, children must be aware about
the consequences of poor eating habits and lack of
exercise practice. The growing interest of children
in new technologies and the learning they take from
it (Akhter, 2011) could be useful to instill healthy
lifestyle knowledge. The use of technologies as a
way to spread healthy lifestyle habits is not new. The
study by Jarvinen (J
¨
arvinen, 2007) shows already sev-
eral websites with free or paid subscriptions that al-
low users to receive online counseling about eating
habits and physical exercise. More recently these In-
ternet services have been using mobile applications to
facilitate the insertion of nutrition and exercise data
of users (e.g. My Fitness Pal (MyFitnessPal, 2014)
and My Net Diary (MyNetDiary, 2014)). The use of
smartphones with these services allows an easier and
quicker way to submit information and retrieve feed-
back on the eating and exercise behaviors of users.
However, the target users for this type of websites
are adults since it is of their own interest and ini-
tiative to stay healthy. Adults are willing to make
the effort to fill food diaries, report exercise habits
and other type of information as long as they have
the feedback about their nutrition and physical con-
dition. In order to get the same goal for children,
the current websites will not work adequately since
their display of information and user interface design
is not suitable for the age group (Taslim et al., 2009).
The way children report their nutrition habits must
be simple, intuitive and enjoyable in order to make
them repeat several times (by their own initiative) that
process. The way that information is displayed must
also be taken in concern since children tend to prefer
larger letter fonts and images, animations and audio
to substitute text information (Bruckman and Band-
low, 2003). There is already some work attempting to
promote this healthy lifestyle education and simplify
the process of entering food and sport practice infor-
393
Guimarães N., Ferro-Lebres V. and Ribeiro J..
AFINA-te - A Healthy Lifestyle Information Website, Online Food Diary and Exercise Log Directly Towards Children.
DOI: 10.5220/0005459403930398
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2015), pages 393-398
ISBN: 978-989-758-107-6
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
mation. Regarding healthy lifestyle habits there are
several works trying to spread knowledge in this area
through educational games. Grocery Hunter is an ed-
ucational mobile game that intends to teach healthy
eating habits to children and fight obesity by mak-
ing them do healthy food choices when they are at
the grocery store (Kim et al., 2011). The application
consists in a search game where the users receive tips
from a cartoon regarding a specific food item. When
the player finds it, he points out the mobile camera to
it and the application will provide feedback whether
it is the correct choice or the wrong one. Another
work with the same purpose is the MunchCrunch.
This quiz team game with healthy eating questions
targets the teenagers and intends, in a fun way, to
teach them more about good nutrition habits (Man-
sour et al., 2009) . It becomes clear the contribution
that educational games have in children and how can
enhance their learning (Alemi, 2010; Virvou et al.,
2005). It is also important for children applying that
knowledge to their eating and exercise habits and see
how they are damaging or benefiting their health. So
it is important to have an online food and exercise log
so they can monitor both of those health components.
The GetFit website was developed with the purpose
of monitoring activity and eating habits for patients
of the Children Fitness Clinic (CFC) at the Univer-
sity of Virginia. The counselors can monitor patient’s
activity and nutrition habits between face-to-face ses-
sions through online diaries that the patients fill. The
website also contains information, links and educa-
tional games regarding healthy habits (Olson et al.,
2010). Due to its development purpose, Get Fit web-
site was not design to provide feedback to their users
on their daily habits. It is comprehensive since it in-
tends to be used between patient-counselor meetings
and it is here where the patient receives the neces-
sary feedback about their habits. Another problem is
that patients must fill their diary and activity logs. We
must question if they would still go to the website and
fill the logs based only in their interests and motiva-
tion. The goal of this paper is to describe the basis and
the process of building the Afina-te platform. Afina-te
is the portuguese acronym for ”physical activity and
nutrition information for adolescents”. The website
is a health counseling Internet service specifically di-
rected to adolescents and its main goals are to pro-
mote a healthy lifestyle and provide counseling and
feedback depending on each user physical character-
istics (like weight, gender and height), eating journals
and physical activities. It is also the goal of Afina-
te to make an intuitive and suitable interface, keeping
children interested in providing their daily nutrition
and activity habits.
2 RESEARCH APPROACH
The main goal of Afina-te website was to provide
a specific and feasible alternative for kids of the
current nutrition and fitness online platforms. The
project group consists in nutritionists, dietitians, ex-
ercise specialists and a web programmer. The project
started with the development of the Afina-te database.
MySQL system was used to create and manage users
information like credentials, personal information
(i.e. address, cellphone, email), physical measure-
ments (i.e. weight, height), school and activities
schedule, food logs and exposition time. This last
one was one of the requirements since the beginning
of the project so we could try to understand where
users spend more and less time (consequently improv-
ing the pages they rarely visited). Exposition time is
controlled in the following way: every time a user ac-
cesses a page in the Afina-te website, a timer starts
to run in the server. When he leaves the page, the
time he spent there, the user id and the name of the
page is stored in the database. The database was de-
signed to include information relatively to food items
and quantities. Afina-te food database includes over
800 items and 2000 quantitative measures regarding
those items. Most of the items are retrieved from the
Portuguese Food Composition Table (FCT, 2014) for
precision purposes. However there is a small percent-
age that was retrieved directly from food labels. The
design phase began with the construction of a basic
website structure and suffered major changes along
the entire project, not only due to the feedback we
were taking from test users, but also from the study of
web design trends. The information presented in the
several sections has also change during the develop-
ment process since writing adaptations and text to im-
ages replacements were frequently made to create an
interesting website for the users age range. Nutrition
and exercise specialists wrote all texts from the site in
Portuguese. The type of writing was also adapted to
the age group in question. It was also defined at the
beginning of the project the importance of establish-
ing a limit time of 60 minutes per day, so the website
itself does not encourage users to exceed the recom-
mendations of screen time (Kaneshiro et al., 2014).
3 RESULTS
3.1 Site Design
The site design consists in a navigation menu that is
always fixed at the top of the page as figure 1 shows.
This menu has several buttons represented by icons.
CSEDU2015-7thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
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The icons illustrate the section of the website the but-
ton leads to. However, since the icon may not provide
enough information on the section topic, a description
will come up on hovering the button (in the figure the
descriptions is “Take a Change”). There are two more
elements on the right side of the menu. The first one
is a counter of how many users are online at the same
time (in this case 1) and the other is the remaining
time the user has for the day. Below the navigation
Figure 1: Navigation Menu.
menu we have the page content that varies according
to the section where the user is. Across all Afina-te
website we use a flat design. This particular kind of
design was made popular lately due to its use in oper-
ating systems (such as Windows 8 and OSX) and sev-
eral smartphone applications. The main features of
flat design is the absence of shadows, gradients and
textures that are used for giving a three dimensional
effect (TheNextWeb, 2014).
3.2 Site Features
Figure 2: Example of content page.
The website is divided in 3 main sections: My Per-
sonal Space, Nutrition and Exercise. Nutrition section
has content pages about energy, nutrients, food wheel,
food and fitness, healthy body and healthy recipes
(figure 2 shows an example). All this pages were de-
signed to display the information using the maximum
of interactivity, images and animations possible. As
an example, in each nutrient page we have specified
the necessary daily intake for each user based on the
data stored. We also have images to illustrate where
the nutrients are found, animated food wheels and in-
teractive recipe books. Below we describe the most
interactive pages in the nutrition section.
Example Label - an interactive label where the
user can click in the different sections and learn
about them through information displayed in pop-
up windows;
Label Inspector - in this section the user is asked
about concrete information on the nutritional val-
ues and ingredients presented on the label. He
must click in the label section where the answer
is. As an example the user could be asked which
ingredient is present in the largest amount. The
user must know (from the information provided in
the example label) that the ingredients are ordered
by the amount included in the product;
”Who Wants to Be Healthy?” - is a similar game
to the popular TV quiz show “Who wants to be
a millionaire”. The user must answer correctly to
15 questions of multiple choices using the knowl-
edge he acquired from other sections of the site.
The user has 3 help options: 50-50, call to a friend
and public help. The first one random removes 2
wrong options of the total 4. The other two are
probabilistic choices. The more closer the user is
to the victory the less probable is to get the correct
answer from the “help”.
The exercise section contains information about the
different exercise components such as strength, flexi-
bility and aerobic endurance. It also includes a section
with information about sports such as football, bas-
ketball and tennis. It is our goal to update this section
with new sports when Afina-te is fully operational (in
order to keep users interested in the site). In the ex-
ercise section the user can also ask questions about
this topic. These questions are available to all users
so it should not be personal questions (there is a sec-
tion for those kinds of questions that we will discuss
later). Exercise specialists who collaborate in the site
will give the answers to the questions asked. The third
section of Afina-te website is the “My personal space”
section. It is in this section that the user provides all
the information about his daily meals and weekly ac-
tivities. It is also in this section that the user retrieves
the most part of the feedback. We will describe the
different pages of this section in more detail.
3.2.1 My Personal File
In this page the user can check his personal data that
was given in the register (like address, birth date and
cellphone). It can also see his physical data such as
weight, height and fat percentage. This information
is displayed in text form. The rest of the page con-
sists in the following graphs: user fat percentage in
comparison with the recommended values, daily in-
take in comparison with recommended intake, daily
energy expended in comparison with energy intake,
monthly energy expended in comparison with energy
AFINA-te-AHealthyLifestyleInformationWebsite,OnlineFoodDiaryandExerciseLogDirectlyTowardsChildren
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intake, daily nutritional (fat, protein, fiber and lipids)
consumption in comparison with daily recommenda-
tions. The previous daily and monthly nutritional in-
formation graphs can be consulted through navigation
buttons that allow selecting a specific date. The daily
information is only provided if such entries exist in
the food log.
3.2.2 Online Food Diary
To add a meal to the food log, the user must first fill in-
formation relatively to date, hour, type (i.e. breakfast,
lunch,. . . ), local and company. After the submission,
a new meal will be added to the meal list. The user
can them add food to that meal, delete the meal, see
the list of food items already added and see the nutri-
tional graph of the meal. The “add food item option”
has 2 different types of search: search by name (where
options are shown as the user starts to type the name
of the food) and search by food group. There is also
an option to copy a previous meal (since some meals,
like breakfast, are very similar) and a most frequently
used food item selection (where the most 5 used items
are shown for selection). In all options the user must
select the cooking method of the food (grilled, roast,
cooked...), a measure (1 spoon, 1/2 plate...) and quan-
tity ingested. The user can add meals up to 3 days
before the current day. He can also generate a daily
report in PDF with the correspondent nutrition infor-
mation for printing purposes.
3.2.3 My Weekly Schedule
In this section the user can define his weekly sched-
ule. This includes classes and extra curricular activi-
ties. The user can add or remove activities. Each time
a user adds a non-sport activity he must fill a form
with the name of the activity, start and end hour and
day of the week. He may also add a description. In
case user selects a sport activity, Afina-te website has
a database with more than 200 sports and respective
METS. METS is the unit of energy cost and it allows
the calculation of energy expenditure for a particular
activity (Mackenzie, 2003). This way, the graphs pre-
sented in “My Personal File” section are more precise
since they retrieve data from the user daily activities
to calculate the daily energy recommendation.
3.2.4 My Goals
Each user can define up to 3 different goals to improve
his health. The goals can be ”loose weight”, ”increase
muscular mass” and ”increase cardiorespiratory en-
durance”. The user must also establish a limit num-
ber of days to fulfill each goal. When it is submitted,
the nutritionists and exercise specialists who collabo-
rate in the Afina-te website must validate or reject the
goal (if they think that is not achievable). They can
also leave advices to help the users fulfill them.
3.2.5 My Photos
This page is the user gallery to upload his meals, exer-
cises and other nutritional and sports related photos.
This section is mainly to give the user some social
network features although in this first stage, the pho-
tos can’t be shared with others. It also allows storing
photos of the interactive food log whose functionali-
ties we will mention below.
3.2.6 My Questions
This is where each user can ask the nutritionists and
exercise specialists working in Afina-te about their
doubts and concerns. The questions and answers will
be private so other users can’t access them.
3.2.7 My Parents Questions
The parents will have a special access so they can
keep track of the information that their children are
exposed to. However, such information will be rela-
tively only to the contents of the pages and no per-
sonal information of their children will be shown.
Thus, we guarantee the confidentiality of users and
that they are not constrained on the information they
share. This is the only section exclusively to the par-
ents and it is similar to ”My Questions”. This is where
they can ask about any aspect of the website or receive
help tips to improve their children health habits.
3.2.8 Interactive Food Diary (What Did I Eat)
Figure 3: Example of the interactive food log.
In this section we provide a fun and interactive
way to fill the online food journal. The user can
search the food in the item box that contains an
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auto complete functionality (it will make suggestions
based in the inputted letters). Once the item is found
the user must select the cooking method and the mea-
sure type. In the end, an image of the correspondent
item will show up. The user must drag the item and
place it in any part of the plate. The same item can
be added multiple times since what it is dragged to
the plate is a clone of the original. To delete an item
from the plate the user should drag it to the trash bin
icon. To add drinks the user must click in the glass
button to open a popup window. Then he must select
the type of drink and measure using the “+” and “–“
to fill and empty the cup (the drink in the cup refers
to the quantity that the user ingested relative to the
measure he selected). In the end he clicks “OK” and
the drink is added to the meal. It is possible to submit
multiple drinks by repeating the process. The user can
also add soup to the meal by clicking in the respective
button. A similar popup window will appear where
he can select the type of soup and measure. Multiple
soups can be added to the meal. With this interactive
application, the user can construct a very similar plate
to the one he had. When the plate is complete the user
clicks the submit button and must complete the meal
information such as date and hour. The user can also
take a picture of the plate that it will be stored in the
his personal gallery.
3.2.9 What I Should Eat
This page is very similar to the “What Did I Eat” page,
however it allows users to freely construct a meal in
the same way than before and get feedback (through
text and graph) on the adjustment of that meal in their
daily intake. This means that the user can learn if his
daily meals are adjusted to his daily nutritional intake
or not.
4 DISCUSSION
Afina-te website is a new approach to an old issue: the
fight against obesity. There are already several online
websites to help users to improve their health. How-
ever very few are directly targeted to children and the
ones that are, have an old design and lack of feed-
back due to the context that they were built (Olson
et al., 2010). Afina-te intends to explore the relation
of children with technology to instill some healthy
lifestyle knowledge, making them use part of their
daily screen time to learn and receive feedback about
their nutrition and exercise habits. We predict that the
way information is presented and the several interac-
tive pages of the website will raise interest enough so
users continue visiting it and filling the food and ex-
ercise logs. It is also important to update the platform
with new content on a regular basis to keep users mo-
tivated to revisit it. The website developed takes in
consideration the several design studies made. Nev-
ertheless, children were not involved in the design
process being only used for occasional feedback on
a particular section or page. This may present a lim-
itation to the correct and intuitive use of the website
since children should be involved since the beginning
of the design and content development. Also, since
the age of the users differs widely, the content and
design may not be ideal for every user. However,
a pilot study is scheduled in one portuguese school
in different age users so we can have some feedback
relatively to design and content. We intend to deter-
mine which parts are suitable for all users and which
parts are needed to adapt for different ages and gen-
der. Based on the feedback we will create different
designs for the website which will be displayed ac-
cording to the user’s age. We tried to make a more
general design for the pilot study and we will adapt it
accordingly to the feedback received. In America, the
use of smartphones in children has increased signifi-
cantly (Rideout, 2013) so the development of a smart-
phone application to complement the website would
be useful to simplify the input of information (since it
would be done on the fly) and consequently provide
almost instantaneous feedback about the logs submit-
ted. The absence of such application could be seen
as a limitation to achieve more precision in the logs
since children tend to easily forget some food if they
do not write it down immediately after the intake.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Web-based interventions seem to allow users to ac-
cess information at their own pace (time, place, cogni-
tive assimilation of information etc.) (Griffiths et al.,
2006); permitting a better exposure and a more in-
tensive cognitive processing (Brug et al., 2003). In
particular, for adolescents also other advantages have
been identified, the effect of novelty; the attractive-
ness of the internet to this age range; and the use
of online communication as one of the main forms
of communication for young people (Griffiths et al.,
2006). Moreover the use of technologies in inter-
ventions regarding health knowledge has been recom-
mended (USD, 2010), considering that personal feed-
back on health practices together with tailored infor-
mation about the best health choices, has considerable
potential to communicate a personal need to change
(USD, 2010). In this paper we present a health coun-
AFINA-te-AHealthyLifestyleInformationWebsite,OnlineFoodDiaryandExerciseLogDirectlyTowardsChildren
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seling web platform that, unlike other similar web-
sites, the target population are children. Each user has
access to easy to read information about nutrition and
exercise presented in simple text, images, animations,
interactive applications and games. They also have
access to feedback about their health through the fill-
ing of interactive online food logs, exercise schedules
and chatting with nutrition and exercise specialists.
Afina-te is a learning platform for children conse-
quently leading them to better understand, apply and
monitor healthy behaviors, therefore preventing and
help treating obesity and overweight. In the future,
we intend to make an intervention in several public
schools to determine if the site fulfills its purpose . It
would be also interesting, in a future step, the creation
of a smartphone application for the Afina-te platform
making it a full health counseling bundle (website +
smartphone application) for children.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Project supported by: PTDC/DTP-DES/1328/2012
(FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-028619); and Research
Center supported by: PEst-OE/SAU/UI0617/2011.
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