To tackle Type 2 diabetes, the Suggestic founders have created a “lifestyle GPS” app that works as a personal assistant to help people with Type 2 diabetes navigate towards a healthier lifestyle by providing contextual suggestions related to nutrition, physical activity, exercise, sleep and stress management.
Focusing on the concept of precision medicine, targeted treatment based on an individual’s gene, environment and lifestyle, it employs machine learning technology to extract and validate causal patterns between each person’s genes, metabolism, diet and psychology.
“We need to really understand who is the person and what is the right intervention for them…. to see the patient as not only a biological being but also psychological self which changes in different contexts. To really do this, we need machine learning,” Rosen said.
By adapting machine-learning models, Suggestic culls and analyzes correlated patterns between the user’s genes, diet and metabolism, then generates personalized recommendations to reverse the diabetes.
“Adequate control can lead in many cases to the reversal of symptoms and biomarkers enabling persons with diabetes to lead an almost normal life,” Shai explains. “That is the reversal we are aiming for by helping them change and maintain the healthiest lifestyle for each individual.”
Users will download Suggestic’s app and receive baseline dietary and exercise advice for diabetics. From there “you add layers of personalization,” Shai says, from age and weight to lab results and known blood-sugar triggers, stressing that their role was not to replace that of health professionals, but rather to extend or augment their work, particularly in the area of better adherence to treatment and improved care.
Suggestic is constantly crunching data and with an emphasis on evidence based medicine and is backed by a board of health professionals, geneticists and machine learning academics. They have a team of investors that Shai considers “patient and really understanding of the time this kind of work takes. We will not hurry our process beyond what makes sense just to please an investor.”
The crossroads between machine learning and personalized healthcare is definitely something that will become an important part of medicine, and it will be interesting to see the outcomes of later trials by Suggestic as they work to improve the prognosis for those afflicted by diabetes.