Interactive Cause and Effect Comic-book Storytelling for Improving Nutrition Outcomes in Children

Abstract

Obesity among children and adolescents is increasingly becoming a major public health problem, Poverty and lower socioeconomic status as well as lack of parental awareness regarding a balanced diet and adequate exercise all contributes towards high overweight and obesity rates among Latino American children. Access and affordability of smartphones and mobile internet devices provide an opportunity to create nutritional educational interventions that can significantly impact and change attitude and knowledge regarding healthy diet and exercise. In this paper we present the design of a comic book style interactive storytelling mobile application that creates multiple cause and effect scenarios that the child can role play and learn from. The novelty and innovation lies in the design of the application to begin at a clinical setting while requiring completion at home and involving significant participation by the parent and the child.

Development of Innovative Picture Storybooks to Empower Parents and Teachers for Early Childhood Education in Nutrition and Social-Behavior in Jakarta

“…A study of Latino American parents and their children showed that an Interactive Cause and Effect Comic-book Storytelling (ICECS) intervention program improved knowledge regarding healthy diet, nutrition, and exercise, and promoted parent-child communication. This study complemented the learning process and improved knowledge sharing by using a mobile application (Amresh et al, 2015). Study in American Indian and Alaska Native addressed the benefit of storytelling in delivering the health message to the children.…”

“…Story telling using picture books is a low-cost method of increasing the engagement by the caregiver and the children. These studies showed that community empowerment and nutrition education were effective when combined with appropriate nutrition topics and parenting messages within attractive tools in the effort to reduce the risk of malnutrition (Donna Winham, 2013;Amresh et al, 2015).…”

Designing for oral storytelling practices at home: A parental perspective

“…Despite the importance of oral storytelling at home, digital storytelling tools have predominantly been viewed as a way to facilitate children's literacy outcomes and have been often designed to be used in a formal education context aligning with existing curricula. Children's use of digital storytelling authoring has been found to improve children's learning outcomes such as communication (Al-Mousawi and Alsumait, 2012), emotion regulation and rehearsal of emotions (Wallbaum et al, 2017) as well as understanding of specific concepts, such as for example healthy eating (Amresh et al, 2015). Interaction designers have grappled with balancing children's creative open-ended story construction with a highly scaffolded story-making process designed to foster specific outcomes.…”

Design, implementation and evaluation of a game-based intervention targeting Latino children for improving obesity outcomes

“…In [3] a detailed review of the potential of video games to tackle obesity is presented. In [4,5] the importance of story, immersion and narrative to promote behavior change targeting obesity is presented. Broadly games and visualizations have been used to improve clinical outcomes in [6, 7, and 8].…”