UA Researcher Wins National Grant to Produce Children’s Health App

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. Kim Bissell, associate dean for research in The University of Alabama’s College of Communication and Information Sciences, has been awarded a Senior Scholar Grant for 2014-15 from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

“I was very honored and humbled to have been selected for this award because the competition looks at ‘senior’ faculty members and researchers who have been working on their programmatic research for several years, if not several decades,” Bissell said. “To know that I was competing with people of that caliber and was still selected was definitely an honor.”

Bissell was one of three recipients of a $4,000 award, with an additional $750 in travel assistance for the AEJMC 2014 Conference. She will present her initial results in a special session at the conference in Montreal, Canada.

Bissell’s project, titled, “My plate, your plate and a new me: Using new media technologies to gauge children’s food intake and help children become more health literate,” will be an effort to refine the measurement of children’s daily food intake. She will work toward development of a smart-device app that will give children visual and verbal prompts for the types and amounts of food they select.

“I try to supplement what children get in school in terms of health education and teach them practical things like how to read a nutrition label, how to understand what a serving is and how to make good food choices,” Bissell said. “The work, to date, has largely been classroom presentations and interactive ‘games’ that I lead with small groups of children. What the current grant will allow me to do is develop an app for a smart device like an iPad or iPhone that will give children a more precise way to track their food intake.”

Bissell will be working with school children in schools that already have the smart devices as part of technology grants or Title 1 funding.

Along with Dr. Scott Parrott, UA associate professor of journalism, she also recently published a monograph titled “Prejudice: The Role of the Media in the Development of Social Bias” in Journalism & Communication Monographs. The piece looked at development of bias and stigma related to people who are overweight or obese.