Suggestic App For Type 2 Diabetes Gives Patients A Personalized Lifestyle Program
When it comes to managing type 2 diabetes, patients have a lot to deal with. Besides making sure their blood sugar (glucose) is at the correct level, diabetics must also take various medications, eat healthy foods, and get regular exercise. A new app called Suggestic aims to help diabetics keep track of all these components, and more, by providing users with incredibly personalized lifestyle programs.
Using DNA collected by 23andMe, lab results, and the sensors on a smartphone, Suggestic creates a personalized plan that’s supposed to help people with diabetes manage just about every aspect of the disease, as well as their lives. Specifically, these programs will include recommended changes to “nutrition, activities, sleep, stress management, supplements, and more,” the company’s website says.
“We have built Suggestic to help you navigate a plan created around your specific needs,” Suggestic founder Shai Rosen told Medical Daily. “We want to remove the stress and complications of following a lifestyle program by giving you actionable suggestions at the right moment and in the right place.”
The app uses machine learning like IBM’s Watson to constantly gather, process, and update user information. Then, it modifies lifestyle programs based on this data. Rosen told ThinkBigData this is important because type 2 diabetes is a complex disease to manage. There’s so much information to understand, and it’s “simply impossible for a human to make sense of all that data, so we end up using ‘best practices’ that would work for most people.”
The problems with this, Rosen said, “is that averages-based solutions are not effective. All of us are unique individuals and need our treatments to be tailored specifically to our metabolism, genetics, microbiome, psychology, preferences, and so much more.” It’s within this space that machine learning makes its largest impact since a computer can calculate all this information much quicker than any human can. And if patients ever find themselves unsure about the suggested lifestyle program, they can chat with a Suggestic agent 24/7 through a chat interface.
With more than 29 million people living with diabetes in the United States alone, Suggestic may be the app that keeps people on track. To be a part of the app’s pre-release program, check out Suggestic.com.