[eng] Childhood obesity continues to be an important public health issue; it is not only a disease, but
also may lead to social disabilities and diseases in adulthood in the long term. Development of
maturity onset diabetes in young people is the most common consequence of childhood obesity.
The use of mobile technologies and wearable devices for improving health care processes and
outcomes (mHealth) is promising for health promotion. This protocol will describe the development
and evaluative process of family – based mobile application for early prevention of childhood
obesity and to enhance parents’ participation in improving child health, using wearable as a tool to
measure physical activity. Methodology will describe development process, which will be followed
by four main stages such as: 1) Collecting requirements from pediatricians, primary care
professionals on nutrition education practice, guidelines and on the typical profiles of parents or
families that could get most benefits from the intervention; 2) Prototyping the app features based on
the collected requirements from pediatricians, primary care professionals on nutrition education
practice and on The MAPS Toolkit; 3) Revising the prototyped features with pediatricians and
nutritionists with respect to content and behavioral change strategies; 4) Deploying the intervention
in evaluation study with target group. During the fourth stage a randomized clinical trial will be
conducted to evaluate effectiveness and efficacy of the mobile application. 10 target child/parents
pairs will be randomly selected and assigned to either an intervention or a control group. During 6 –
month intervention period children in both groups will wear wearable device wGT3X-BT
ActiGraph accelerometer, however control group will receive traditional supervised exercise (SE),
and intervention group will receive daily activities suggested by mobile application.