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Top1. Introduction
Obesity is a pan-European epidemic presenting a major barrier to the prevention of chronic non-communicable diseases. It is becoming an epidemic affecting the life of over a billion citizens globally (MRC, 2009; Hainer, Frelut, & Seidell, 2002; EMHF, n.d.). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a majority of men are obese or pre-obese in most European countries except for Belgium, Denmark and Italy (IUFoST, 2007; Londahl, 2007). In the UK, two thirds of men and 50% of women are overweight. If current trends continue, the year 2010 will witness over three quarters of the British men being overweight (see, Obesity is also rapidly rising among children with estimates of 12 million children overweight, of which 2.9 - 4.4 million are clinically obese; European Association for the Study of Obesity, 2004; Murphy, 2009). A great challenge facing the community is to introduce population-wide approaches to weight management as existing health and medical provisions do not have capacity to cope. Technology nowadays is being an essential tool to provide worldwide healthcare especially for those who are not able to visit their physicians or healthcare providers more often. The encouragement of taking preventative measures to the upward trend in chronic diseases is getting through and more people are self-managing their health. That makes an opportunity for companies to develop medical devices and services to empower individuals to manage their own healthcare (Murphy, 2009) (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Overweight and obesity in Adults. All figures are based on the IOTF criteria for defining overweight and obesity in children using age and gender-specific cut-offs equivalent to adult BMIs of >25 (overweight) and >30 (obesity) (The Oxford Health Alliance, 2010)
Current common methodologies for measuring the activities of daily livings (ADL) such as direct observation, self-report questionnaires and diaries, Doubly Labeled Water (DLW) - the measurement of energy expenditure- and heart monitoring can be inaccurate in measuring physical activities and are inconvenient for their time consumption. In addition they are unreliable since it could depend on the subject’s memory and intrusive for the patient/ user (Steele, Holt, Ferris, Lakshminaryan, & Buchner, 2000; Firstbeat Technologies, 2007; Rowett Research Institute, n.d.).