On the design of voice-based conversational agents for prevention and management of obesity and overweight condition adolescents

The WHO European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative (or COSI), reports that in the fourth round of data collection (2015 - 2017) one in three children aged from six to nine years is living with overweight or obesity [1]. Today it is broadly accepted that overweight and obesity are largely preventable if better healthcare strategies are adopted and innovative interventions are introduced [1], [2]. A promising technology that can help children and their immediate environment adopt WHO-recommended measures and provide nutritional counselling are Voice-based Conversational Agent (VCA). In this work, the service design thinking paradigm [3] is applied to design and develop a new VCA-based service. The main findings of the process are presented along with the key observation that drove the development of the proposed service.