Research Project BigO (12/2016 - 11/2020)
Objective: Supporting Public Health policies targeting childhood and adolescent obesity
COSMOTE is participating in the BigO European research project (Big data against childhood Obesity, http://bigoprogram.eu/) that aims at community-targeted policy strategies to address the major global and European problem of childhood and adolescent obesity. To this end, BigO will develop an innovative platform that will allow the evaluation of the obesity prevalence risk in order for the Public Health Authorities to take local action, based on objective evidence.
Currently, public actions are detached from local needs, mostly including indiscriminate blanket policies and single-element strategies, limiting their effectiveness. This is due to the lack of monitoring and evaluation framework to objectively quantify the local community characteristics in a reasonable timeframe. BigO is based on the active participation of more than 25.000 students (of 9-18 years old) who are going to help with the Big Data collection process provided by smartphones, wearables and eHealth-devices (wristbands, mandometers, etc.). Processing of the collected data will allow for the quantification of community behavioral patterns in order to objectively evaluate and redefine the way the prevention and response strategies regarding childhood and adolescence obesity have been developed at a regional and eventually, national and European level.
As part of the project, COSMOTE is helping define use cases, the user/system requirements and the overall system design. In addition, COSMOTE will lead the raw data collection from sensors and external sources, contribute to the development of mobile applications, as well as to the testing and evaluation of the BigO platform. Finally, COSMOTE is participating in the dissemination and exploitation activities for the BigO project.
The project receives co-funding from the EU through the Horizon 2020 Framework Program, it is being implemented by 13 partners from 5 European countries (Greece, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands and Ireland) and is planned to run for 4 years (12/2016 - 11/2020).