Gizmos & Gadgets: Lifestyle GPS Comes to Diabetes Patients with Smartphones

April 9, 2016 – In 2014, 422 million people were diagnosed with diabetes. Global prevalence among adults 18 and over had risen from 4.7% in 1980 to 8.5%. These statistics come from the World Health Organization’s global report which predicts that diabetes will be the 7th leading cause of death in 2030. In 2012 it was the direct cause of 1.5 million and another 2.2 million died from high blood sugar. Complications from diabetes include heart attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and lower limb amputation.

Between 90 and 95% of diabetics suffer from Type 2 diabetes also known as adult-onset. So of the 422 million diagnosed with the condition 387 million suffer from Type 2. Getting closer to home, in the United States 9.3% of all adults are diabetic. And among seniors (65 or older) that number is 25.9%.

What’s the major cause? Lifestyle. Too much weight and not enough activity. Eating a diet high in sugar and saturated fats. The role obesity plays cannot be underscored enough. From Canadian statistics in 2014, among those 18 years and older categorized as obese, 14.6% had diabetes. For non-obese Canadians in the same category the rate of diabetes was 5.2%.

So if lifestyle is the cause then why not create a lifestyle self-help tool. Enter Suggestic, a California Silicon Valley startup that has developed an application and Internet site focused on personal wellness with the aim to reverse Type 2 diabetes through lifestyle management.  Shai Rosen, co-founder and chief marketing officer for the company calls their app a “lifestyle GPS.”

To use it you download the app from the Suggestic site. It prompts you to enter personalized health and genetic data. The site analyzes these entries and creates a first plan recommending diet, nutrition, activities, sleep, stress management, supplements and other suggestions. As you use it and see improvements the app continuously helps you visualize your progress through positive feedback and negative if you stray from the path.

What will you see when you use Suggestic?

• over one million recipes filtered to your eating requirements
• the best foods and menu choices when eating at restaurants
• the right food choices in preparing a weekly grocery shopping list
• continuous reminders on taking medication and doing daily activities

The results are only achievable if the data going in is good. Suggestic asks you to submit DNA, blood, saliva and gut microbiome lab results. Why? This gives it a digital presentation of you.

The science behind this is simple. The idea is to inhibit negative gene expression over a lifetime through lifestyle modifications to reverse epigenetic triggers that can turn biological disease switches on. In this way Suggestic can achieve its goal to reverse Type 2 diabetes.

What’s behind the Suggestic app and site?

• A knowledge database of more than 20,000 scientific papers and proven clinical programs.
• A causal pattern recognition technology, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), to understand the unique characteristics of individuals and create epigenetic lifestyle interactions through the app.

The AI tool used was first developed by Suggestic’s founders to assist banks in doing causal pattern recognition for fraud detection. In this case they have adapted it to discover causal patterns within individual lifestyles.

The app is expected to be launched this month in the United States. The company hopes to go global in the near future.