Your AI Health Buddy – How Virtual Coaches Can Help You Beat High Blood Pressure.

Managing health conditions has become very easy in the past few years, especially with access to doctors and health coaches from anywhere in the world with the help of the Internet. Today, one can also use mobile phone applications to control and manage healthy living.

A new way to manage hypertension or high blood pressure has come from scientists in California who have created an AI health coach that helps decrease blood pressure in patients with a problem of hypertension.

Thinking about how these technological innovations work? Let’s find out:

Benefits and Features of Virtual Health Coaches

We are all aware of how we can now get care from virtual health coaches at our fingertips. Using apps for creating guides that fit the lifestyle of the user is nothing new, but an AI health coach that lowers blood pressure is definitely a novel advancement.  These are the core benefits of such tools:

• Data Collection: There are many ways in which the AI health coach collects data for further analysis. One such way is through wearable technology, which includes wristwatches that collect basic data like heart rate and physical activity. The app connected to the wristwatch or wearable technology stores and analyses this data, thereby monitoring the patient’s health and providing apt feedback.
• Personalisation: The virtual health coach reviews each patient individually and analyses their lifestyle, finding the biggest factors leading to high blood pressure. Then based on the analysis, it provides lifestyle shifts that the patient can make slowly and gradually. The AI coach does this while also checking their blood pressure at regular time periods.
• Prediction: One of the most interesting things this technology can do is predict problems that the patient might face due to their current lifestyle. This predictive ability, based on analysing behaviour patterns, is helping identify a higher risk of hypertension

How an AI Health Coach Understands a Patient

Every virtual health coach application requires the patient to provide some information about themselves:

• Age
• Name
• Gender
• Weight
• Baseline systolic and diastolic blood pressure
• Ongoing hypertension medication, if any.

Above and beyond these aspects, the virtual health coach also asks additional questions that allow it to understand the patient’s lifestyle. These questions include the following:

Q1. Do you consume alcohol?

Q2. How frequently do you consume alcohol?

Q3. What is the quantity of alcohol that you consume?

Q4. Do you do any physical activity?

Q5. How frequently do you partake in this physical activity?

Q6. Do you smoke?

Q7. How often do you smoke?

Q8. How frequently do you consume fast food?

How does the virtual health coach function?

Current research on this technology found that many patients with type 2 hypertension began to see marked high blood pressure within the first 14 weeks of using this tool. The technology analyses patient data collected from the questions and combines it with real-time data from wearables. Based on this, it comes up with simple weekly solutions that include simple lifestyle changes such as:

• bettering the patient’s sleep schedule,
• monitoring BP at regular times,
• ensuring physical activity takes place, and
• other small changes in their behaviour towards taking care of themselves.

This ensures that the patient receives guidance that is specifically curated for them.

Example 1: if a person has a habit of smoking consistently throughout the day, which has the potential to increase their BP, the app would include changes in their behaviour that aid in reducing their intake. This includes helping patients by showing them how much time has passed since their last smoking session to encourage them.

Example 2: if a person finds it difficult to manage their weight, the virtual health coach would create small intervals for physical exercise as a daily routine.

These notifications are very smartly put across to the patient through text messages or using simple yet effective prompts on the mobile app. The nature of these messages is to motivate them to take better care of their blood pressure health.

Impacts of virtual health coaches on patient health

A good number of patients saw improvement in their systolic (top) and diastolic (bottom) blood pressure. About 14mm Hg and 8 mm Hg decrease were seen respectively within a time frame of 24 weeks. Very little attention is required from the doctors for the application and it is also good enough for patients to use because it is that accessible.

Future of AI health coaches

A study by researchers at Boston University focused on an app that runs on mathematical calculations that help decide which BP medication is best suited for the patient based on their lifestyle. The goal of such studies is to ensure more personalised care and its availability to all. The more advanced predictions and analysis that this AI health coach can make include de-prescribing or stopping certain medications that are hampering the therapy. In the future, it is expected that virtual health coaches can provide highly accurate predictions such as these on a patient-to-patient basis, with minimal errors.

Future of AI health coaches

Using AI-based approaches to solve the problem of managing hypertension is quite new and is often countered by saying that AI is not to be trusted, especially with health. However, it is clear that a subjective and personal-fit approach can benefit the patients much more than general guidance from the internet. This is why AI health coaches might be here to stay.

We still recommend that you consult your general practitioner before planning to depend on any specific app completely. Usually, it’s best to keep your options open and remember that everyone responds differently to different methods of healthcare.

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