BigO presented at the European Childhood Obesity Group Annual Congress (ECOG) 2019

BigO had a strong presence at the ECOG 2019 conference on November 13-16 at Katowice Poland. The conference brought together professionals from all around Europe dealing with childhood obesity and overweight.

In collaboration with the ECOG’s board, BigO organized a plenary session to inform the audience around “Smart technologies and BigO data to help policy makers tackle obesity”. On behalf of BigO, Dr Ioannis Ioakeimidis and Prof Anastasios Delopoulos presented current project outcomes including the data collection system and methods as well as preliminary results on eating behaviours of high school students in Stockholm and Athens.
Moreover, two distinguished experts in Public health research and information, Prof Kevin Balanda and Prof Mark Gilthorpe addressed main challenges and opportunities arising in the use of Big Data in public health. Their talks focused on the adoption of these new technologies by policy makers for surveillance of population behaviours and environments and the complexity of analyses to extract causal factors for obesogenic behaviours.

Conference participants met afterwards with BigO researchers at the project’s booth for more detailed discussions. Finally, a focus group with the two experts, members of the ECOG board and five BigO members was held to receive feedback on the approach and technologies developed within BigO.