The Fed-Up application tracks the users’ daily routine and food purchasing habits by asking a series of questions about their location, modes of transportation and where they usually stop on their way to and from school
Children enter in the food they bought, where they purchased it and who accompanied them
Fed-Up is an interactive, web-based game-like application that tracks children’s food purchase habits to fight childhood obesity
Client: University of Pennsylvania School of Design
Challenge: Childhood obesity has become an epidemic in the United States, and kids from low-income neighborhoods in urban environments like Philadelphia are particularly at risk. The availability of healthy food is limited and children aren’t exposed to alternatives. Professor Amy Hillier of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, studies the behavior of these at-risk children. In order to gather real-life data, she approached Azavea to build an online application that would provide a game-like interface to enable children to record the choices involved in their food purchases. Ultimately, Dr. Hillier’s goal is to educate participants about nutrition and how to become better consumers, and provide incentives to change their behavior.
Solution: Azavea built Fed-Up, an interactive, web-based game-like application that empowers children to make smart, informed food choices. The application tracks the users’ daily routine and food purchasing habits by asking a series of questions about their location, modes of transportation and where they usually stop on their way to and from school. Children enter in the food they bought, where they purchased it and who accompanied them. A map displays these stops, indicating nearby alternatives and proximity to schools, libraries and recreation centers. The children’s entries are logged in the database view and can be easily exported for analysis. This visualization of the children’s progress motivates them to make future changes and informs researchers of important behavioral choices and geographical factors that might be linked to childhood obesity.
Outcomes: Fed-Up promotes healthy eating habits to children by tapping into their interest in new technology. It also allows researchers to monitor their behavior and record invaluable data via a fun, non-threatening medium. There is great potential for extending this application, including the addition of features that would enable users with smartphones to look up food items with their camera or automatically detect their location with the phone’s GPS.