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

> **NIH NIH R01** · BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE · 2020 · $505,658

## Abstract

The obesity field is fraught with problems of measuring people's diet, physical activity and sedentary behaviors
that are hindering the advancement of the field to find promising solutions for obesity prevention and treatment.
An important example is screen media use, 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. Given the important impact screen use has on children's health, our ability to measure
the time children spend on screens is very limited. Current assessments typically rely either on (1) general
questions estimating “typical use;” or self- or parent-report via screen use diaries, both which have reporting
bias and recall bias; or (2) devises initially intended to restrict children's TV viewing (TV Allowance™), which
may have intervention effects or miss-classify TV viewing time. While automatic and objective measures of
physical activity have shown validity and reliability for quantifying children's physical activity, 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. We 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). Our trans-disciplinary group,
consisting of behavioral researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and electrical engineers at Rice
University, propose to 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 application, 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 6-10 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. This project has the potential of creating a paradigm shift in
scientist's ability to assess the role screen use has on health outcomes or intervention effects of scre...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9906897
- **Project number:** 5R01DK113269-04
- **Recipient organization:** BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE
- **Principal Investigator:** Teresia Margareta O'Connor
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $505,658
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-04-01 → 2022-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9906897

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9906897, Development and Validation of an Automated Measurement of Child Screen Media Use: FLASH (5R01DK113269-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9906897. Licensed CC0.

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