Development and Validation of an Automated Measurement of Child Screen Media Use: FLASH

肥胖领域充满了测量人们的饮食、身体活动和久坐行为的问题 这阻碍了该领域的发展，无法找到有希望的肥胖预防和治疗方案。 一个重要的例子是屏幕媒体的使用，这是久坐不动的一个突出原因， 肥胖和代谢综合征，以及其他不必要的生理，社会心理和学术 儿童的成果。考虑到屏幕使用对儿童健康的重要影响， 孩子们花在屏幕上的时间是非常有限的。目前的评估通常依赖于（1）一般 估计“典型使用”的问题;或通过屏幕使用日记自我或家长报告，两者都有报告 偏见和回忆偏见;或（2）最初旨在限制儿童观看电视的设计（TV Allowance™）， 可能有干预效应或误分类电视观看时间。虽然自动和客观的措施， 身体活动已经显示出量化儿童身体活动的有效性和可靠性，没有系统， 自动，准确和不显眼的已经开发出来，以评估儿童的屏幕使用不同的 平台技术的进步，如人员检测，基于图像的准确面部识别， 成像、计算机视觉和信号处理算法现在提供了新颖且有前途的解决方案， 客观自动地测量人们的屏幕观看行为。我们将利用这些最近的 先进的和整合他们开发的第一个同类，在家里，不引人注目的，自动的，隐私保护 屏幕使用监测系统：家庭级屏幕使用评估（FLASH）， 嵌入式计算平台连接到较大的固定屏幕上的摄像机（FLASH-TV）;或 使用前置摄像头（FLASH-Mobile）作为后台应用程序。我们的跨学科小组， 由贝勒医学院的行为研究人员和莱斯大学的电气工程师组成 大学，建议开发和评估的有效性的FLASH，以准确地识别是否和如何 只要孩子使用屏幕媒体设备。在这种多PI应用中，FLASH的开发由 工程师在Rice一旦最终系统开发完成，经过alpha和beta测试，将进行验证研究。 由行为研究人员在观察实验室中对6-10岁的儿童进行FLASH-TV， FLASH-Mobile（n=43）。将FLASH输出与工作人员对儿童的观察进行比较 参与一系列结构化的预定义活动。将评估下一个闪存的可行性， 在自然主义家庭环境中识别儿童跨平台屏幕使用的准确性（n=46）， 直接观察和筛选使用日记。这个项目有可能创造一个范式转变， 科学家评估屏幕使用对健康结果或屏幕媒体干预作用的能力 减少程序，类似于身体活动研究的加速度计。闪存具有以下潜力 对关于屏幕媒体使用的公共卫生和临床研究具有显著影响。

The obesity field is fraught with problems of measuring people's diet, physical activity and sedentary behaviors that are hindering the advancement of the field to find promising solutions for obesity prevention and treatment. An important example is screen media use, a prominent cause for sedentary time that has been linked to obesity and metabolic syndrome, as well as other unwanted physiologic, psychosocial, and academic outcomes in children. Given the important impact screen use has on children's health, our ability to measure the time children spend on screens is very limited. Current assessments typically rely either on (1) general questions estimating “typical use;” or self- or parent-report via screen use diaries, both which have reporting bias and recall bias; or (2) devises initially intended to restrict children's TV viewing (TV Allowance™), which may have intervention effects or miss-classify TV viewing time. While automatic and objective measures of physical activity have shown validity and reliability for quantifying children's physical activity, no system that is automatic, accurate and unobtrusive has been developed to assess children's screen use on different platforms. Advances in technology, such as person detection, accurate facial recognition based on images, and imaging, computer vision and signal processing algorithms now offer novel and promising solutions to objectively and automatically measure people's screen viewing behaviors. We will leverage these recent advances and integrate them to develop a first of its kind, in-home, unobtrusive, automatic, privacy preserving screen use monitoring system: Family Level Assessment of Screen use in the Home (FLASH) that uses an embedded computing platform connected to a video camera on larger, stationary screens (FLASH-TV); or functions as a background app using a front facing camera (FLASH-Mobile). Our trans-disciplinary group, consisting of behavioral researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and electrical engineers at Rice University, propose to develop and asses the validity of the FLASH to accurately identify whether and for how long a child is using screen media devices. In this multiple-PI application, the development of FLASH is led by engineers at Rice. Once a final system has been developed, alpha and beta tested, a validation study will take place in observation labs by the BCM behavioral researchers with 6-10 year old children for FLASH-TV and FLASH-Mobile (n=43). Comparisons of FLASH output will be made to staff observations of children participating in a set of structured predefined activities. Next FLASH will be assessed for feasibility and accuracy for identifying children's screen use across platforms in a naturalistic home setting (n=46), compared to direct observation and screen use diaries. This project has the potential of creating a paradigm shift in scientist's ability to assess the role screen use has on health outcomes or intervention effects of screen media reduction programs, similar to that of accelerometers for physical activity research. FLASH has the potential of having a significant impact on public health and clinical research regarding screen media use.