GOBEE - Gamified Outdoor Balanced Eating and Exercise

Abstract

Childhood obesity remains one of Australia's most significant preventable public health challenges, with 27.7% of children classified as overweight or obese and fewer than 9% meeting recommended daily vegetable intake. Gobee is a mobile-first Progressive Web Application designed to address this gap by combining gamified outdoor activity with AI-assisted healthy meal discovery for families with children aged 5–12. The platform integrates two core features — City Quest, which converts GPS-guided neighbourhood walks into reward-based activity challenges, and Chef Cam, which uses computer vision (OpenAI GPT-4o) to detect fridge and pantry ingredients and recommend healthy, child-friendly recipes from a database of over 700,000 items. Both features feed into a virtual pet progression system that provides children with intrinsic motivation through visible, positive-reinforcement-based rewards, while requiring no social interaction, public leaderboards, or user-generated content, preserving child safety by design.

Architecturally, Gobee is built on a modular, serverless cloud infrastructure hosted on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito, RDS, S3, and Amplify), with a Vue.js/TypeScript frontend and a FastAPI backend connected to separate PostgreSQL and MySQL databases for recipe and gameplay data respectively. The system was engineered with maintainability, scalability, and compliance as first-order design constraints: it aligns with the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), the OWASP Top 10 (2021) web security guidelines, and the ACS Code of Ethics, minimising personal data collection and ensuring all AI-generated recommendations remain advisory and subject to parental review. Beyond its technical implementation, Gobee is positioned as a scalable, low-distribution-cost platform for potential sponsorship by government health departments, health insurers, and school networks seeking evidence-based digital tools for preventative family health.