Dr Rebecca Wyse

Adopting dietary digital health interventions at scale

Dr Rebecca Wyse, The University of Newcastle

2021 Future Leader Fellowship (Honorary Fellowship)

Years funded: 2022-2025

Most Australian children exceed dietary guidelines, increasing their CVD risk. Dr Rebecca Wyse's research has shown that the ‘Online Choices’ intervention, delivered through school online canteens, reduced the energy, saturated fat and sodium content of student lunches by 37-49%. However, unless such interventions are adopted at scale, they will have limited population impact.

Aims: This research program uses ‘Online Choices’ to:

1. investigate intervention characteristics that facilitate adoption at scale (e.g. effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, acceptability), and
2. investigate strategies that increase adoption of digital health interventions.

Outcomes: This research is expected to reduce the kilojoule, saturated fat and sodium content of lunches for ~21,000 students, and evaluate an adoption model that, given existing partnerships, could efficiently enable national roll-out to >280,000 children. The findings are applicable to other online food ordering systems, suggesting exceptional opportunity to improve population-level CVD risk factors.