Obesity is arguably the single most serious healthcare issue in the developed world today and is a rapidly growing problem in the developing world. To combat this epidemic public health institutions are looking for solutions to reduce the problem, primarily through data gathering, advertising, educational and other preventative measures. To this end it is essential to collect accurate information about peoples eating and exercise habits. At the same time many pharmaceutical companies are undertaking clinical research to develop drug therapies to control and reduce obesity.

In a search of the Thomson Pharma database 1242 clinical studies involving obesity indication are ongoing worldwide. These involve most of the major pharmaceutical companies. In order to determine the efficacy of drug therapies it is critical to determine weight loss (or gain) to gauge study subjects response to treatment. It is important that the reasons for weight loss be validated by accurately measuring food intake and exercise during the trial period, and indeed afterwards.

V-Clinic is the most comprehensive self-reporting electronic diary solution available today. It is capable of tracking thousands of foods and dozens of food components in real-time and in absolute confidence using software downloaded to the study subjects mobile phone. The information can also be input via a web interface. These data are de facto attributable to the study subject - because personal mobile phones are pretty much always on the study subjects person and are always switched on compliance is much more likely than paper based diary approaches. They are also contemporaneous in that the time and date of data entry is captured - retrospective data entry may be limited as required by the study. Because the data is entered from predefined menus it is automatically legible - legibility is often a problem with paper-based records. For similar reasons accuracy may be improved with the system because at the start, or at any moment during the study, the user has the ability to input favourite foods and define portion sizes. This also ensures good precision.

Data that is input over the internet is original in that it is directly recorded to the V-Clinic database on entry. Data entered into mobile phones is periodically uploaded to V-clinic servers, however this data can also be stored on the phone locally and collected during or at the end of the study period from mobile phone media cards for validation against the uploaded data in case of transmission problems. Using V-Clinic ensures very significant cost gains over traditional paper methods coming out at fraction of their cost.