Families on Track: A Digital Health Behavioral Intervention for Parents Seeking Treatment for Their Child With Obesity

Overview

Current models of outpatient childhood obesity treatment focus on the child's health habits, with limited efficacy. In part, this may be because childhood obesity is highly sensitive to parental lifestyle habits, who are often not a direct target of child obesity interventions. This study aims to target weight loss among overweight parents of 2-16 year old children with obesity enrolled in the Duke Healthy Lifestyles Program (HL) in order to augment child body mass index reduction. The intervention, " Families on Track" is a digital health intervention platform using the Interactive Obesity Treatment Approach (iOTA).

Parents in the program will receive the family-based treatment protocol provided by the Healthy Lifestyles clinic. First, families attend a half-day session at the clinic where child anthropometrics and labs are obtained, and nutrition and physical activity group counseling is provided. Height and weight of the primary adult caregiver are measured and BMI is calculated. Second, families return 2 weeks later to meet individually with a pediatric obesity medical provider and a registered dietitian. Thereafter, frequency of visits is determined based on the families needs with a final visit 1 year after starting treatment. The ideal is to have visits with the HL staff at intervals of 4-6 weeks for 5 more visits to complete the primary phase of the program over 6 months. Parents enrolled in the study will also receive the Track intervention. The investigators will use a modified version of the Track intervention, which utilized the Interactive Obesity Treatment Approach (iOTA). iOTA uses a computer algorithm to assign 3-4 personalized behavioral goals known to create an energy deficit to produce weight loss (e.g., sugary drinks, fast food consumption walk 10,000 steps/day, etc). The team at Duke Digital Health has shown that iOTA can be successfully delivered to adults on multiple modalities -- web, text messaging and interactive voice response phone calls. Each week, participants will receive a prompt from the Track intervention system in order to self-monitoring these behaviors goals. These prompts will be delivered either via interactive voice response or text message. Intervention participants will also receive an analog bathroom scale and a pedometer to self-monitor daily weights and steps.