Business Dynamics
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The growing demand for health services tied to exploding costs are a growing concern for all national health care systems, which are reaching their limits of volume and case complexities. In the long run reliance on institutional health care delivery systems is not sustainable and may require shifting responsibilities of health management to individuals. Such a shift would require major paradigm change by focusing on individual's well-being and providing tools for its management. For example, by 2015, it is expected that one of every three people worldwide will be overweight and one in ten -- obese. Considering that while preventable, obesity is responsible for over 60% of all leading death causes in developed societies, it is critical to understand the mechanisms that may lead to its control. The obesity model presented in the paper was developed using system dynamics and is based on three-factor models combined into an energy balance equation. The results were tested with weight loss clinic data. Tools for quantified self-tracking may provide an automated source for data collection needed to refine the model and estimated individual characteristics needs as model parameters.