Visualizing pediatric obesity data to determine treatment strategy effectiveness and improvements

Abstract: Pediatric obesity is skyrocketing nowadays worldwide. Therefore, helping and supporting clinicians in curing children is needed. As Health IT is soaring thanks to the emergence of a cutting-edge technology, treatments can now be followed closely and daily to give a personalized therapy. Thus, this thesis investigates how to build a clinical decision support tool to address this issue. The study was carried with the company Evira by following the user-centered design thinking method. The user research, carried out with semi-structured interviews at Martina Barnsjukhuset and Capio Vårdcentral Zinkensdamm, provided the users needs. A prototype was developed with considering this user research and requirements. Next, it was tested by experts during task-based and semi-structured interviews. This evaluation phase concluded that the prototype was intuitive and effective. By using different metrics, it allowed clinicians to see the activity of the patients, the irregularities and variation of their weight, their weighting habits, and the gender distribution of the patients. The final tool corrected some of the requests obtained during the evaluation. Thus, the proposed interface could support the decision of clinicians to improve treatment effectiveness and enable better resource planning. Further research can still be carried out in order to fine-tune this tool.