An app to help people manage prediabetes helps, and there’s room for improvement, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Prediabetes can be controlled with multiple lifestyle interventions to avoid development of diabetes, and an app helps. That’s according to research by Nas Mathioudakis, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues. Mathioudakis says the results are consistent with that seen with other such interventions.

Mathioudakis: Patient facing interventions with AI technology, in general the literature showing that patients are slow to accept AI based interventions for various conditions. We did find that some people reacted negatively to the kind of canned messages that were coming out. It started feeling a little formulaic. Push notifications can work for some people up to a certain point and then they can become bothersome. Mainly that was the feedback we got from our participants is it doesn't feel personalized.     :30

Mathioudakis says the next version of the app will use so called generative AI to further personalize messaging and hopefully compare favorably with a human coach. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.