Childhood obesity continues to be a significant public health issue. mHealth 
systems offer state-of-the-art approaches to intervention design, delivery, and 
diffusion of treatment and prevention efforts. Benefits include cost 
effectiveness, potential for real-time data collection, feedback capability, 
minimized participant burden, relevance to multiple types of populations, and 
increased dissemination capability. However, these advantages are coupled with 
unique challenges. This commentary discusses challenges with using mHealth 
strategies for child obesity prevention, such as lack of scientific evidence 
base describing effectiveness of commercially available applications; relatively 
slower speed of technology development in academic research settings as compared 
with industry; data security, and patient privacy; potentially adverse 
consequences of increased sedentary screen time, and decreased focused attention 
due to technology use. Implications for researchers include development of more 
nuanced measures of screen time and other technology-related activities, and 
partnering with industry for developing healthier technologies. Implications for 
health practitioners include monitoring, assessing, and providing feedback to 
child obesity program designers about users' data transfer issues, perceived 
security and privacy, sedentary behavior, focused attention, and maintenance of 
behavior change. Implications for policy makers include regulation of claims and 
quality of apps (especially those aimed at children), supporting standardized 
data encryption and secure open architecture, and resources for 
research-industry partnerships that improve the look and feel of technology. 
Partnerships between academia and industry may promote solutions, as discussed 
in this commentary.