Enhancing Nutrition Learning Using Interactive Tools

Abstract

Today health promotion is a key factor worldwide. Health promotion enables people to increase control over their own health. For this reason, several efforts have been done to develop ICT tools to promote good health habits, including nutrition information, active living and weight loss. Many of these tools, however, are planned to be used by adults who are concerned about their health. Unfortunately, most of them are not useful for children, because they are not particularly worried about nutrition, however habits developed in the formative years of life have a lasting effect on health.  In this paper two obesity prevention tools designed for children are presented. These prototypes are based on interactive computational techniques such as augmented reality and serious games, intended to be more appealing to children.  The prototypes´ design is presented as well as the results obtained from evaluation in order to offer key guidelines to developers interested in implementing ICT tools to children.