How do we ensure safety with medical apps? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A smartphone app helped people with prediabetes improve their lifestyles as much as a human led diabetes prevention program, research from Nas Mathioudakis, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues has shown. Mathioudakis says future plans to let the app use ‘generative AI’ to personalize responses for users needs scrutiny.

Mathioudakis: If we're going to use gen AI how do we ensure that there are guardrails and that the information provided is evidence based? One approach is to really train it on a corpus of medical literature that is evidence based, nutrition and physical activity guidance, to limit it to that. Some strategies that have been thrown out are using AI to check AI so you have these like filters of AI verifiers. Third is clinician auditing of prompts and text.   :28

Mathioudakis predicts some combination of these strategies will be needed so that apps provide both best advice and best strategies for health. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.