Friday, April 19, 2024
4/19/2024
Project summary The explosion of digital technology ownership in the past decade has led to a dramatically increased screen exposure for children. In the United States, over 95% of families with children have a smartphone, TV, and desktop monitors, which has raised a growing concern about the impact of screens on children's health. Excessive screen exposure has been closely associated with increased eye problems, sleep disorders, obesity, and cognitive impairments among children. Due to these concerns, World Health Organization (WHO) has recently (April 2019) suggested that children between 2 and 4 should have less than 1 hour of sedentary screen time per day. However, there is an evidence gap between actual screen time in research and parental control and assessment from measurement tools. Existing methodologies of assessing screen exposure lack construct validity, as they heavily rely upon self-report, smartphone applications, or research technologies (e.g. eye- tracking glasses). Self-report is prone to reporting bias. Smartphone applications lack the capability of measuring cumulative, concurrent screen exposure across multiple screen types and are not able to confirm the identity of user (the same child or his/her parents). Research technologies, such as eye-tracking glasses, can be invasive to children and are limited to the measurement of regions of selective visual focus. Currently, there is no effective and minimally invasive tool that can be used to provide objective and accurate measurement of both sedentary screen use and screen exposure across multiple screen types. This project seeks to develop a wearable device and robust AI algorithms to provide objective and accurate screen time measurement for children. Aim 1 will develop a minimally invasive device and computer vision methods to detect screen exposure patterns and differentiate various screen type. Aim 2 will testify the design in a free-living environment on children. The proposed work will provide an important new tool to objectively and comprehensively measure children's cumulative and discrete free-living screen exposure in quantity and duration. We anticipate this technology will serve as a universal screen-time measurement tool and benefit parents, preschool teachers, and interest groups in their management and advocacy of child(ren)'s sedentary activities and media use. We also anticipate our tools will help academic researchers, clinical psychologist, and consumer researchers via providing objective measures in behavioral study and therapy.
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