Mobile devices help remove barriers to fresh food From: Inside Stanford Medicine - 08/08/2011 By: Kris Newby Mobile devices help remove barriers to healthful food for seniors, adults with disabilities. Conditions can be challenging for those using wheelchairs or walkers, with a trip to the market requiring residents to travel down a busy street, and to navigate around sidewalks blocked by parked cars, poorly lit streets, and a crosswalk light too brief for them to cross the four-lane intersection. These physical barriers to fresh-food sources are often overlooked by city planners, said Matthew Buman, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar, and Sandra Jane Winter, PhD, a research associate at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, after the center’s Active Aging Studies team conducted an audit of 40 senior housing facilities in Northern California. This inspired the team to find a better way to alert city officials about these environmental obstacles. And this better way is the “Stanford Healthy Neighborhood Tool", a software application that allows community advocates wielding smartphones and tablet computers to document impediments to walkability, safety, and healthful-food access. Read the entire article and watch a video at: http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2011/august/runnymede.html Links: Eat a carrot and get out of that chair, or your iBird dies http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2011/august/brief-miles-0808.html Stanford Prevention Research Center http://prevention.stanford.edu/ Spectrum http://spectrum.stanford.edu/ Office of Community Health http://och.stanford.edu/ Related: Hand-held computers prod older adults to exercise more http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2008/february/PDA.html These blocks are made for walking http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2007fall/walking.html Neighborhood Eating and Activity Advocacy Team http://www.sbm.org/meeting/2011/presentations/wednesday/seminars/Seminar%2010%20-%20Matt%20Buman.pdf Seniors help build a blueprint for a healthier city http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2011/08/seniors-help-build-a-blueprint-for-a-healthier-city/ Matthew Buman mbuman@stanford.edu Assistant Professor Arizona State University Exercise and Wellness Program School of Nutrition and Health Promotion 500 N. Third St., MC 3020 Phoenix, AZ 85004-2135 602/827-2289 mbuman@asu.edu Sandra Jane Winter sjwinter@stanford.edu Abby King abby.king@stanford.edu --- Mobile Devices Help Remove Barriers to Fresh Food From: Stanford School of Medicine - 08/08/2011 By: Kris Newby Researchers at the Stanford Prevention Research Center have developed a way to notify city officials of the environmental barriers seniors face in trying to reach sources of fresh food. The Stanford Healthy Neighborhood Tool is a software app that enables community proponents to document obstacles to walkability, safety, and healthful-food access using tablet computers and smartphones. The app lets advocates roam a neighborhood, take pictures of obstacles with a mobile device's camera, and make voice recordings characterizing the hazard. Once a photo is captured, the app records the hazard's site via a global positioning system. All of the hazard images and locations can immediately be downloaded wirelessly to a map on a Web site, to be shared with researchers, city planners, or policymakers. The tool was developed by Stanford's Neighborhood Eating and Activity Advocacy Team, a project to help senior neighborhood residents analyze and address the challenges to eating healthier foods.