Childhood Obesity: The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and School-Aged Children

Obesity among children in America is at an all time high, 57.3% of the nation’s children will be obese by the age of 35. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) policy. The HHFKA modified the nutritional and physical policies in order to reduce the obesity rates by changing their expenditures. Schools in all 50 states that are subject to federal, state and local nutrition regulations were researched. This was a quantitative, non-experimental, correlation study that measured state compliance with the USDA guidelines and tested for an association between compliance score/rate and the school-aged children’s obesity rates using descriptive statistical analysis. Energy Imbalance Theory (EIT) is the theoretical framework used for understanding obesity. A hierarchical linear regression was used to show the strength of the relationship between childhood obesity rates and compliance scores by state while controlling for median income and urbanization. The overall model demonstrates a correlation with school aged students’ obesity rates, compliance scores, income and urbanization. However, the findings from this study suggest the most significant correlation was found between the obesity rates and median income. No significance was found between obesity in children and compliance scores or urbanization with the results can be used by communities to encourage healthy behaviors in children and raise awareness of activities aimed at reducing obesity in children who live in low income families in the United States

The Extent and Coverage of Current Knowledge of Connected Health: Systematic Mapping Study

Background: This paper examines the development of the Connected Health research landscape with a view on providing a historical perspective on existing Connected Health research. Connected Health has become a rapidly growing research field as our healthcare system is facing pressured to become more proactive and patient centred. Objective: We aimed to identify the extent and coverage of the current body of knowledge in Connected Health. With this, we want to identify which topics have drawn the attention of Connected health researchers, and if there are gaps or interdisciplinary opportunities for further research. Methods: We used a systematic mapping study that combines scientific contributions from research on medicine, business, computer science and engineering. We analyse the papers with seven classification criteria, publication source, publication year, research types, empirical types, contribution types research topic and the condition studied in the paper. Results: Altogether, our search resulted in 208 papers which were analysed by a multidisciplinary group of researchers. Our results indicate a slow start for Connected Health research but a more recent steady upswing since 2013. The majority of papers proposed healthcare solutions (37%) or evaluated Connected Health approaches (23%). Case studies (28%) and experiments (26%) were the most popular forms of scientific validation employed. Diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and heart conditions are among the most prevalent conditions studied. Conclusions: We conclude that Connected Health research seems to be an established field of research, which has been growing strongly during the last five years. There seems to be more focus on technology driven research with a strong contribution from medicine, but business aspects of Connected health are not as much studied