Health Literacy-based Weight Control Intervention

This research will be a continuation of 2015-2017 research projects of smart phone APP research granted by Ministry of Science and Technology. First of all, a four-wave-cross-sectional survey by cluster sampling is used to recruit 90 adolescents aged 13-19 from high school, vocational schools or colleges to test the feasibility of the health literacy-based weight-control program. In the second stage, a two-arm randomized controlled trial (RCT) will be applied to recruit 240 overweight or obese teenagers to receive health literacy-based mobile Health App, smart sports watch Fitbit versa during the 12 months weight control program. Based on the previous research evidences, the outcome follow up will be scheduled on 3 months, 9 months, 15 months, and 21 months after the mobile Health Apps intervention. Short-term outcome indicators include health literacy, diet pattern, and dietary behaviors; long-term outcome indicators include BMI z-score, waist circumference. Intention-to-treat analysis, generalized linear mixed models with repeated measures, multiple regression analysis model, and counterfactual causal Inference will be applied to analyze the effectiveness of the interventions.