A digital, patient-centered approach to early life obesity prevention

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This application requests support through an Administrative Supplement to an existing NIDDK K01 (K01DK114383). The parent grant for this application proposes new insights into the prevention of childhood obesity, with an overall goal of preventing obesity by identifying infants at greatest risk and providing for them an effective, family-centered intervention that targets modifiable, life course factors. The purpose of this Administrative Supplement is to expedite completion of this research due to delays encountered after childbirth and more recently, the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, funding will support transitioning Aim 3 to digital platforms. This aim seeks to partner with families to explore new ways to communicate early life obesity risk that account for their perceptions, concerns and beliefs. The human-centered design methods we proposed to accomplish this aim are innovative, but require face-to-face interaction, which can be timely and difficult to coordinate, inconvenient or burdensome to participants, or impossible during this time of physical distancing. Therefore, to expedite timely completion of Aim 3 work, this application proposes to: (1) use a large-scale Internet platform (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to quickly and efficiently recruit eligible parents; and (2) replace in-person research encounters with virtual activities using Zoom Health and FocusVision’s Revelation, a HIPPA-compliant, user-friendly, online qualitative research platform. Moving this in-person research to online platforms will still allow us to explore patient-reported themes and identify areas of parental concern in early life obesity prevention, but with increased speed, efficiency, and flexibility. The use of virtual data collection methods will leverage the parent K01 award’s network of design research collaborators, ensuring that I complete Aim 3 of my K01 award in the intended timeframe, while also allowing us to engage parents who would otherwise be difficult to reach, either because of their geographic location or because they face barriers to in-person research participation. Finally, in this era of social distancing, we have begun to think about new approaches to patient recruitment and engagement that can be accomplished digitally, requiring only a broadband connection. Aligning my K01 research activities with remotely-conducted methodology will also enable me to understand newer, more robust and flexible approaches to qualitative research that do not require face-to-face interactions that increase the risk of viral transmissions. Findings from this Supplement will thus inform efforts to conduct patient-centered research during future public health emergencies while also enhancing the success of the parent K01 award focused on early life obesity prevention.