Can an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital health program that’s personalized to provide individual lifestyle guidance help people better manage their hypertension and decrease clinician workloads?
That’s the question a team of researchers asked as part of a new study. The program used data from participants’ wearable fitness trackers, blood pressure monitors and daily questionnaires to give each participant customized weekly recommendations focused on improving factors such as activity levels, sleep, stress and diet.
Participants included 141 adults with stage 2 hypertension (blood pressure ≥140/90 mmHg) who used the program for 24 weeks. At the study’s close, personalized AI coaching proved highly effective, with participants seeing an average 8% decrease in systolic blood pressure and 6% decrease in diastolic blood pressure. Those with the highest starting blood pressure saw even better results, with a 14% drop in systolic and 9% drop in diastolic readings.
Three key study takeaways:
- The AI lifestyle coaching program drove clinically meaningful reductions in blood pressure, comparable with nurse-led hypertension programs requiring far more human resources.
- 2% of participants consistently used the program each week, suggesting that the personalized and highly targeted AI approach enhances engagement over general, generic recommendations. Increased engagement, the study authors wrote, “likely bolstered participants’ motivation, as they could clearly see how specific lifestyle modifications directly influenced their BP.”
- Only 6% of participants required human clinician follow-up over the 24 weeks. This finding, the study concluded, is because the AI system automatically monitored participants’ blood pressure readings, provided personalized guidance and only flagged clinicians when critical values were detected. In this way, the authors said, the technology could allow a small team of clinicians to remotely manage hypertension care for a large patient population in a resource-efficient, scalable manner.
