PmEB: A Mobile Phone Application for

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PmEB A Mobile Phone Application for Monitoring
Caloric Balance
CSG170 Human Computer Interaction Bhavna
Balani
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• Do you think people are more health conscious
  these days?
• Yes, because most of the dieses are due to
  overweight so people have become health conscious
  now.
• The main cause for obesity is attributed to poor
  eating and exercise habits.
• There are two main factors that directly affects
  calories
• Diet
• Exercise

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Why is Monitoring Caloric Balance
important? Weight management is all about
balancebalancing the number of calories you
consume with the number of calories your body
uses or "burns off." This is achieved by
monitoring the caloric intake/burn in your body.
Monitoring what you eat and how much you eat?
Monitoring your physical activity. What if we
do not monitor the caloric balance?
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• Traditional Techniques for monitoring calories
• Self-awareness, self-monitoring is more effective
  than conventional health education and appraisal
• Conventional paper based techniques
• Carrying around a diary to record food intake and
  
• Prepare retrospective reports on exercise
• Problems with conventional techniques?
• Examples of food diary,

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• How feasible is to use Mobile for recording data?
• The always-carried and always-on nature of phones
  means that the ability to record data is
  consistently available throughout the daily life
• No need to carry any additional equipment or
  diary
• Still there were doubts on feasibility of
  cell-phone
• Low compliance

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• Questions
• Can cell-phone monitoring of diet and physical
  activity improve user compliance over
  conventional paperbased techniques?
• Are the phones capabilities in data entry and
  viewing adequate?
• To answer these questions they designed and
  developed PACE-mEB(Patient-Centered Assessment
  Counseling
• for Exercise Nutrition - Mobile Energy Balance,
  or
• PmEB)

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• Overview of PmEB system
• Application for mobile phones that allows
• users to monitor their caloric balance as a part
  of
• weight management
• Prototype
• The PmEB system consists of a client application
• running on the users mobile phone and a server
• application running on a web application server.
• The server application has three primary
  functions
• To send reminder messages
• To store the food and activity database, and
• To keep a record of the users daily calorie
  data.

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Basic functionalities
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• Modifications after formative evaluation of PmEB
  with seven experts
• Enhancements to resolve issues
• Created an intuitive, graphical display of the
  current caloric balance,
• Added a history page to record previous entries
  that
• were made
• 3. Added unique icons for each major pages to
  allow users to quickly identify where they
  were in the application

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• User Study
• Six participants who are clinically overweight
• Pre-study interview, week long deployment and
  post-study interview
• Three key assessments
• user compliance,
• usability and user satisfaction, and
• users reports on the impact on their dietary and
  activity habits

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Conclusion Evaluation results have shown that
PmEB has potential for facilitating weight loss
and management. PmEB addresses the challenge of
improving user compliance, data reliability, and
self-efficacy of self monitoring of calorie
intake and expenditures.
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• My evaluation
• Users study performed with very small group of
  users
• Lack of comprehensive database, user need to add
  food and physical activity manually.
• Application is limited to J2ME compliant
  cell-phones.
• Low user compliance 66
• Good improvement in user interface and
  functionality after formative evaluation
• The main purpose of the application was achieved
  with successful positive impact on users dietary
  and activity habits

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• Extension
• The application should provide the functionality
  of unit conversion automatically while entering
  food intake.
• User should be able to create mean plan and save
  for reusability aspect.
• The web-based interface for analyzing data
• The web based interface can also be used to
  automatically enter the information into the
  database instead of manual food entry
• Application should display a graph of weight loss
  with timestamp.
• Most of the caloric balance software have food
  database with 30,000 items. This application has
  751 food items. User needs to enter food item
  manually, leads to wrong data
• Recommendation for diets based on calorie if user
  selects this option.

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Thank you