Mexican students engaged in WeNet pre-pilot

We organized the first WeNet workshop with Mexican students on August 24th, 2019. The workshop took place at IPICYT, San Luis Potosí City, and gathered 30 local college students who’ll participate in the WeNet project as volunteers. The overall goal of WeNet in Mexico is to use new mobile technologies to study a pervasive problem affecting young people: overweight and obesity. According to national statistics, there are more than six million youth under 25 affected by obesity. The WeNet platform will be used to study the young people environment in relation to their eating and physical activity habits.

The workshop had three goals. The first goal was to introduce the WeNet project to a number of students who were interested in participating. The second goal was for volunteers to understand and ask questions about the specific terms of participation in the study. Volunteers who were interested in joining the study after this phase were asked to complete a consent form. The third goal was to complete a series of initial questionnaires about their basic habits regarding eating, mobility, physical activity, and use of mobile technology. The workshop was coordinated by the You-i Lab team at IPICYT led by Dr. Salvador Ruiz Correa.

In the next couple of months, we will use the i-Log mobile app to collect detailed eating and physical activity data from our volunteers. Several WeNet partners are contributing to this phase. The i-Log tool was developed at the University of Trento (UNITN) to collect in-situ data from phone sensors and short surveys. The implementation of the infrastructure for data collection involves a collaboration between UNITN and U-Hopper. Once collected, the mobile data will be by Idiap Research Institute and IPICYT.