Development and Validation of an Automated Measurement of Child Screen Media Use: FLASH

Children's screen media use has been identified as a prominent cause for sedentary time that has been linked to obesity and metabolic syndrome, as well as other unwanted physiologic, psychosocial, and academic outcomes in children. However, no system that is automatic, accurate and unobtrusive has been developed to assess children's screen use on different platforms. Advances in technology, such as person detection, accurate facial recognition based on images, and imaging, computer vision and signal processing algorithms now offer novel and promising solutions to objectively and automatically measure people's screen viewing behaviors. Investigators will leverage these recent advances and integrate them to develop a first of its kind, in-home, unobtrusive, automatic, privacy preserving screen use monitoring system: Family Level Assessment of Screen use in the Home (FLASH) that uses an embedded computing platform connected to a video camera on larger, stationary screens (FLASH-TV); or functions as a background app using a front facing camera (FLASH-Mobile). The trans-disciplinary group, consisting of behavioral researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and electrical engineers at Rice University, will develop and asses the validity of the FLASH to accurately identify whether and for how long a child is using screen media devices. In this multiple-PI study, the development of FLASH is led by engineers at Rice. Once a final system has been developed, alpha and beta tested, a validation study will take place in observation labs by the BCM behavioral researchers with 6-11 year old children for FLASH-TV and FLASH-Mobile (n=43). Comparisons of FLASH output will be made to staff observations of children participating in a set of structured predefined activities. Next FLASH will be assessed for feasibility and accuracy for identifying children's screen use across platforms in a naturalistic home setting (n=46), compared to direct observation and screen use diaries. FLASH has the potential of having a significant impact on public health and clinical research regarding screen media use by improving scientist's ability to assess the children's screen use. This can lead to better methodology to understand the impact of screen use on children's health outcomes or intervention effects of screen media reduction programs.