In response a Singapore team has developed a handheld-based solution that puts a nutritionist, personal trainer and therapist into the chubby hands of Singapore students.
Aimed at primary and secondary schools here, the HealthTrek Information Tracking System includes 50 Sony CLIE S360 monochrome-screen handhelds with 16MB of storage, HealthTrek software, training for teachers, helpdesk support and two years of hosted database access.
Data entry is fairly straightforward--after a student keys in his food choice into the Palm OS handheld, where over 2,000 dishes of Italian to Vietnamese origin are stored, the carbohydrates, proteins and other nutrients of what he is about to wolf down appear onscreen.
A calorie burn calculator will let the user know if a serving of Thai green curry, Big Mac or Chinese fried noodles will tip him into the danger zone, when balanced against how much exercise he's had. About 800 types of physical activity, from simple walking to rock climbing, are listed.
Another portion of the program lets the student record how sad, dull, energetic, stressed, depressed or anxious he feels at the moment.
Once a week, the handhelds are sync-ed, and the data uploaded to a central database which generates progress reports. The entire system is priced at US$19,000.
The solution was developed by the National Institute of Education (NIE), a government-run teacher-training institute, Sony, IBM and International Application Solutions, an IBM subsidiary.
At a Singapore press conference yesterday, the product's developers said aggregated data will give educators a snapshot of a student's health and state of mind, how diet and exercise affects mood, and vice versa. This information will be useful in planning a school's physical education curriculum or even the food sold in the canteen.
"The data is useful for populations that are healthy as well as those who may be at risk...It can be pooled to provide a composite picture of the pupils, teachers or employees' overall health profile and harness more effective intervention strategies," said Leo Tan, director of NIE.
Work on the flab fighting solution began last year at a cost of US$276,000. The developers hope to make the product available to the public in a year, but could not provide a cost estimate.
