Internet of Things Garage

Object-based Interactive Nutrition Education

Educating Primary School Kids about Nutrition using Object-based Interactions

Children worldwide have poor diets and poor understanding of nutrition, confining food into dichotomous “healthy” and “not-healthy” groups, rather than grasping deeper, more realistic concepts of variety and balance. This project explores how an interactive food ordering system could be designed to help enable children to learn to make healthier dietary choices for themselves. The paper extends a previous study on the PizzaBox system and explores how it can be applied to an audience of 9-11-year-old children, with the additional aim of being an innovative and engaging way to educate in nutrition and dietary choices. Several designs are explored and discussed, and a final design is produced, incorporating the advice of a community dietitian. Further research should extend the functionality, perhaps with a focus on how this project could be used within a program of education in schools. It would be beneficial to measure how effective this intervention is at changing dietary habits and educating its users.



Team


Funding

Cardiff University

Cardiff University is the only Welsh member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities.


Outcomes

COVID-19 Affected

This project has been affected by the Covid-19, where we could not carry out the user studies and co-design activities with primary school children. We will resume at a later time.