Designing, Developing and Deploying Smart Nutrition Education Intervention to Promote Nutrition Related Knowledge among School Children: A Cluster Randomized Control Trial

Introduction: School-children undergo rapid growth with high nutritional needs.Adequate nutritionalknowledge promotes healthy eating making nutrition-education essential.This study assessed the impact of a digital platform-based smart nutrition-education intervention on nutritional-knowledge among 10-14-year-old school-children in Mangalore.Methods: The study was conducted in five private schools with 596 children equally assigned to intervention and control-clusters (n=298 each).An orientation preceded baseline assessment.Intervention-cluster received a six-month digital program with two educational videos per month on nutrition, diet-planning, physical-activity, lifestyle, and personal-hygiene.Data were collected at baseline, post-intervention and six-month follow-up; control-cluster were assessed at baseline and follow-up.Within-group differences were analyzed using Friedman/Wilcoxon (Bonferroni) test, between-group Mann-Whitney U test with effect sizes Kendall's W and r.Analyses were performed in SPSS 27 (p0.05.The intervention-cluster showed significant improvements across pre-test, post-test and follow-up (p0.05).At follow-up intervention-cluster scored higher than controls across most topics (r=0.05-0.35,p