# Telehealth Secure Solution to Provide Childhood Obesity Monitoring
## 1 Introduction  
Childhood obesity has increased considerably in the last decades [1, 2]. The magnitude of the increase has been more than 10-fold in the last 4 decades, with a worldwide increase in the number of obese children and adolescents (5-19 years of age) from 11 million in 1975 to 124 million in 2016. Furthermore, an additional 213 million children were overweight (but not obese) in 2016 [3]. A study commissioned by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that childhood obesity in Mexico doubled over 20 years, from 7.5% in 1996 to 15% in 2016 [4].  
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines overweight and obesity as an abnormal or excessive accumulation of fat that poses a risk to health. For children aged 5 to 19 years, overweight is the BMI for age with more than one standard deviation above the established median in child growth patterns, and obesity is greater than two standard deviations above the median. Obesity is a difficult medical issue to overcome, and its complexity lies in its \"multi-systemic nature\" [5], although an inadequate diet and physical activity in childhood are suspected to be the leading causes of it [6], as well as short sleep duration that may affect energy balance [7]. Childhood obesity represents a serious health problem worldwide [8, 9],as it brings about adverse health issues for those who present this condition, such as increased risks of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, as well as psychological and gastrointestinal disorders, among other health problems. Moreover, overweight and obese individuals, including childhood obesity, can face a greater risk of health if infected with the COVID-19 virus, including hospitalization, intensive clinical care requirements, and even death [10; 11; 12]. It has been argued that if obesity is not controlled early in childhood, children have a high risk of becoming obese adults [13; 14].  
For all the reasons stated above, it is necessary to help prevent overweight and obesity in children so that the consequences mentioned above can be reduced. On the other hand, telehealth provides remote medical services by using telecommunications and data digitalization, including with computers and mobile devices, with the aim of delivering health care remotely and to manage the health of patients. Physicians can access personal medical information around the world using the Internet [15], but data privacy must be considered when insecure channels are used.  
In this work, a remote secure monitoring and supervision platform is proposed that can be used in various health areas. As an example, in this article, the case of application in the prevention of childhood obesity is considered. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: (1) a novel telehealth solution to monitor childhood obesity is proposed based on monitoring physical activity and hours of sleep of children based on activity bracelets, (2) a multi-user network with chaos-based data encryption is included to transmit all the parameters of children securely between parents and specialists, (3) the proposed scheme can monitor and evaluate childhood obesity and avoid personal data theft.  
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Related work regarding with secure monitoring in telehealth is presented in Section 2. In Section 3, family-based weight control for children and the information to be sent are described based on the recommendations of published authors; in Section 4, the proposed multi-user secure communication scheme to monitor childhood obesity is presented and shows how the platform is configured. In Section 5, the experimental results of the simulations of sending and receiving fictitious data on childhood obesity with the chaotic encryption process are shown. The security analyses are presented in Section 6. Finally, the concluding remarks are presented in Section 7.