So we can all agree that we’ve got a problem with obesity in this country. And there a lot of people putting a lot of thought into why that is and how to reverse the trend. Just recently, First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled a roadmap for how we can conquer this problem within a generation.
But do we really know as much as we need to about how the complex reasons the problem exists? Could we perhaps use a little data-crunching to give us a more comprehensive picture before we start flinging money at the issue and designing programs that might be destined to fail?
IBM, it appears, may save the day! Paul Maglio, a researcher at the IBM lab in California, told the Wall Street Journal Health Blog that the company is starting a new computer modeling initiative to analyze mountains for information about lifestyle factors that might have an influence on the epidemic. The computers will collate information on what and how people eat, where they buy their food and where the food is produced.
The computers will take exercise patterns into account too, chewing over aspects of when, where and how much people exercise, what kind of facilities are available to them, what gym classes kids are taking and how many parks are nearby.
“When you take a look at obesity, at first blush it’s about how much you eat and how much you exercise,” said Maglio. “Then you look behind that and ask why people eat what they eat. What kind of food is being grown? How is it delivered? Are Mom and Dad home to cook a meal? There’s a very complicated system behind it all.”
The goal is to inform the work of policymakers, who must take limited funds and apply them to targeted projects that change people’s communities in ways that will help heart rates and waistlines. A good example of the type of decision this data set can help with is the question of whether a particular neighborhood will get more fitness mileage out of new P.E. classes in the school or the creation of a new park in the area.
The project, which will take place throughout the next year, may involve the collaboration of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences. Once the project has shown what it can do as far as analyzing the factors behind obesity, the research team might apply their computer analysis to other tricky public-health problems as well.
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