MONITORING AND CONTROL OF DISORDERED EATING BEHAVIORS USING MOBILE DEVICES

Each day an increasingly amount of people suffer from a DEB (Disordered Eating Behavior). Anorexia and bulimia are the most popular DEBs known. Anorexia affects around 1% of female adolescents being the most dangerous range of age between 12 and 17 years old. The main problem to focus on is not only this type of disorders but also psychological disorders as muscle dysmorphia or obesity. According to the WHO (World Health Organization), in 2008 more than 1.4 billion adults were overweight, which means that, more than 10% of the world's adult population was obese. Because of this, the WHO has been forced to give obesity the proportion of global epidemic. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. This project's most important aim is to assist doctors and psychologists with the control and monitoring of patients who suffer from anorexia, bulimia, obesity and other eating disorders.

This paper derives from a project that brings together health investigations, concerning eating disorders, and the concept of IoT (Internet of Things). The main objective of this project is to educate about healthy eating habits using current technology such as smart phones, tablets or sensors to monitor the activity.

Smart phones and tablets are gaining more users each day. Spain is the country, in the European Union, where there are more smart phones per mobile phone acquired. This, together with the growing use of tablets, built the idea of patient tracing using mobile devices.

This project consists of an Android Application developed to help health-care professionals educate patients' eating habits and lead them towards healthier habits. Constant monitoring of the patient in different scopes is the main feature offered by this project. It provides a tool for the user to insert the ingested food, within the five different meals of the day, and a tool for the user to indicate his weight so that the health-care professionals can keep track of the patient's eating habits and be able to correct them. Knowing the patients' symptoms and moods during each day makes it possible, for the health-care professionals, to follow the progress of the patient during the treatment. This psychological monitoring will help provide therapies in a more personalized way. Most of the time, patients' psychological problems have nothing to do with eating disorders but they can result in the appearance of DEBs.

On the other hand, the project is also developed to include the direct measurements taken by a series of sensors, provided by the Fitbit device, which return data from the physical activity of the patient. It is also possible for the patient to insert the physical activity practiced if there is no Fitbit device available.

Finally, the automation of the dietary intake data will become a key aspect of this project as this technology will make the application easier to use and will require less effort from the patient offering, for example, a recognition of packaged and unpackaged food. This tool is in process of experimentation for a number of patients in a clinic of psychological and nutritional care, which specializes in DEB treatment.