Sweetch which is a mobile-health app that helps prevent and enhance outcomes in diabetes by encouraging long-term behavioral change declared thee outcomes of its clinical trial conducted at Johns Hopkins University. Directed by the university’s Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, & Metabolism, the study shows that using Sweetch significantly lowered A1C levels, a diabetes biomarker for blood sugar, increased physical activity and reduced weight for patients with early stage diabetes.
The Sweetch app remains active for 150 minutes a week and lowers weight by 5 to 7% has been proven to lessen the chances of developing diabetes by 58%. Sweetch developed a proprietary machine-learning technology that predicts and reduces individuals’ risk of developing diabetes and offers a highly personalized intervention to improve the patient’s clinical outcomes. Generic recommendations, such as walking 10,000 steps and eating fewer carbohydrates, have not been found to be effective in engaging patients, especially in the long term. Sweetch’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology offers personalized recommendations that can be realistically achieved and are continuously adapted based on the user’s past behavior.
Sweetch CEO Dana Chanan said “While helping such numbers of people cannot be managed effectively through human-based coaching, Sweetch’s technology has achieved clinically significant results with no human involvement to enable large-scale intervention at a low cost.”
The three-month clinical trial contained 55 pre-diabetic adults at different levels of obesity. Over the course of the trial, Sweetch significantly changed participants’ behaviors with retention rates as high as 86%. On average, participants achieved significant increases in physical activity by 2.8 Metabolic equivalent (MET)-hours per week per participant, lost an average of 1.6 kg, reduced waist circumference by 1.4 cm, and had a clinically meaningful reduction in A1C of 0.1%.