A web application for an obesity prevention system based on individual lifestyle analysis

The worldwide prevalence of obesity is considered as a serious issue because obesity is one of the main causes of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Obesity is associated with various habits of our daily life, e.g. short sleep duration, high alcohol intake, and nonparticipation in physical exercise. Therefore, changing these habits in order to reduce body weight is recognized as an effective solution. There are some web applications in effort to treat obesity, which verify the usefulness of web applications for health-care support. We, the authors, had been developing an obesity prevention system that helps a user to change his lifestyle with a web application and health care devises. The web application of this system detects whether the user has the habits considered as risk factors of obesity. After the detection, this application analyzes first-order and second-order factors of weight gain as the higher-order factor analysis. It displays the results of the analysis in forms of graph and list, in order to encourage the user to change their lifestyle by himself. We had conducted experiments with participants, and we verified the effectiveness of the analysis method for obesity prevention.