According to the NIH, 2/3 of American adults are currently overweight, and 1/3 of American adults are obese. This is happening because of bad eating habits and a lack of exercise, and it's only going to get worse as these habits are passed along to their children, unless we do something about it.
Pretty much all kids love TV and video games, which is obviously a contributor to their lack of exercise. I want to appeal to their love of electronics by creating special handhelds for kids that are designed to teach the kids about leading healthier lives. The handhelds would be sort of like Palm Pilots, but more durable and kid-friendly, maybe in bright colors or patterns to look more fun. Each handheld would have a program that we create installed on it. The program would have a bunch of different fun features designed to catch the kids' attention and teach them, while being fun at the same time. Anything the kids do on their handhelds would automatically be sent to an internet database so that we can track kids' progress over time.
One major feature would be where kids could put in their food intake every day, which would make them fully aware of what they are eating and how much they're eating, where they might otherwise not even notice. After inputting their food intake, the program would analyze their diet. For example, if the child regularly gets very little vitamin C, the program might say, do you get sick easily? Here's why! And explain to the kids why they get sick easily (lack of vitamin c) and what they can do to fix it. There would be a vitamin database explaining in kid terms what each of the vitamins do for you and why they're important, and how you can get more of each in your diet.
There would also be games on the handheld, like quizzes that test how much kids know about nutrition and other exercise and nutrition-related games.
Finally, there would be an exercise portion that talks about why exercise is important. It would feature a game database, with rules for tons of different games the kids can play outside and inside to get exercise all the time.
