Supporting health behaviour change in children can be challenging. Even when you work together with families to set healthy lifestyle goals during appointments, it can be difficult to keep patients motivated in between visits.
The Live 5-2-1-0 app is designed to motivate children ages 8-12 to adopt healthy behaviours related to nutrition, screen time and physical activity through simple customized goal-setting and fun weekly challenges. Children receive positive messaging when they log activities in the app and earn tokens when they complete goals. Tokens can be spent at the Reward Bank — a collection of family-based activities, excursions and items chosen and provided by the family (e.g., play a new board game, choose a dress up theme for dinner or go to the movies).
Over the past two years, families and health-care providers have provided valuable feedback to improve the functionality of the Live 5-2-1-0 app. An upgraded version has been built, offering exciting new features and more customizability so that families can adapt the app to their needs and preferences.
The app now includes a special dashboard for health-care providers, offering a quick glimpse of the patient’s progress at follow-up visits. The patient’s Progress Report can be viewed on their device to see a summary of:
- Changes in the child’s daily health behaviours and willingness to change over time (collected through the app’s built-in assessment, repeated every 90 days)
- Total number of goals completed by the child over time
- A complete history of the goals a child has set
- Self-reported reasons why goals were changed or incomplete
Version 1.2 also includes a new category of activities where children can work on habits outside of the Live 5-2-1-0 message — like sleep, mindfulness and self-compassion.
Try the app today with pediatric patients and families! Parents can download it for free from Google Play or the App Store.
Live 5-2-1-0 would like to thank BC Children’s Hospital Foundation for their generous support in creating Version 1.2 of the Live 5-2-1-0 app. We would also like to thank all of our partners including Shapedown BC, Kelty Mental Health and all of the families who provided valuable feedback and input during the co-creation process — we couldn’t have done it without you!
What is Live 5-2-1-0?
Live 5-2-1-0 is a BC Children’s Hospital Type-2 Diabetes prevention initiative that partners with communities across BC. to empower local stakeholders across multiple sectors to share and support the evidence-based Live 5-2-1-0 message for school-aged children:
- Enjoy five or more vegetables and fruits every day
- Power down — no more than two hours of recreational screen time a day
- Play actively at least one hour each day
- Choose healthy — zero sugary drinks each day
Learn more about the Live 5-2-1-0 initiative and the exciting work happening at BC Children’s Hospital.
Credit: Dr. Shazhan Amed
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