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Obesity e-Lab
Obesity e-Lab
Obesity e-Lab have their own website, which you can visit here.
Why do we need an 'Obesity e-Lab'?
Obesity causes early death and suffering through many obesity-related diseases. That obesity in children and adults is rising world-wide means that the health consequences of obesity are translating into increasing economic costs. Indeed, the rising cost of obesity-related diabetes care alone threatens to bankrupt the NHS. Reducing obesity is a key priority for the Government. It has set Public Service Agreement targets for reducing obesity, but has insufficient evidence to support specific policies on how to achieve the targets. The proximal cause of obesity is simple: an energy imbalance between intake (diet) and expenditure. However, the distal determinants, and their relationships, leading to this proximal cause are far from understood. This is a prime example of one of the ESRC's seven key research challenges: 'understanding individual behaviour and its relationship to biological and social determinants'. Meeting this research challenge for obesity requires inter-disciplinary work across the science base, and better links between social and biomedical data. The evidence base of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions to prevent and treat obesity, to inform policy-making, would be greatly enhanced through application of e-Science.
What will you get out of it?
Tools to share
We will enable social and biomedical researchers to share data, information and analytical tools for obesity research. First, we will create a portal to provide access to the platform and facilitate social networking.
Navigation tools
Second, we will generate search and navigation tools for researchers in academic, NHS or local government organisations to find data from administrative and secure data services, via social science views of health datasets, and health science views of social datasets. Within the NHS, we will link records from a variety of administrative and health (and social) care sources for broadly-specified obesity research, and make pseudonymised extracts of NHS-linked datasets available via the portal.
Analytical tools
Third, we will develop analytical tools, focused on: i) easy, reliable and privacy-protecting transformation of geo-codes in health records to other geographies and area-based social and economic measures; ii) epidemiological extensions to geographical information systems; iii) growth-standardisation of child obesity measures. The tool-building will employ as much existing software as possible, focusing on the provision of simple, intuitive interfaces to proven software to make it easy for social or biomedical researchers to use collaboratively.
The team and timescales
The project will start in Summer 2008. It will be co-ordinated by the Northwest Institute for Bio-Health Informatics (NIBHI), in close collaboration with the School of Social Sciences and the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.