how chat bots can help you with your health
Turns out having an AI assistant give you gentle nudges throughout the day can result in minor, but notable, and long term health improvements.
AI hasn’t had the best press coverage lately, and for good reason. Between deepfake porn, constant, gleeful threats to countless jobs from tech bros who think they’ve now made artists, doctors, programmers, and everyone else they’re not fans of, obsolete, and machine-generated spam corrupting the internet as we know it, there just haven’t been a whole lot of well-publicized positives to focus on. And this is not to mention all the absurd demands of the AI accelerationist community that insists humans are now obsolete and must prepare to serve the almighty infinite machine market as its donor class starts to enter politics with this dystopian agenda.
However, just because we’re not talking about good uses for AI and chat bots doesn’t mean there aren’t any. New research looking at 19 trials with just under 3,600 people in total shows that having a chat bot offer diet and health tips can really pay off in the long run. None of the subjects became ripped athletes, of course, but they did tend to take 735 more steps during the day than usual, add an extra serving of vegetables or fruit to their meals, and get 45 more minutes of sleep per night. While all that doesn’t seem like much, these behaviors are forming healthy habits, the benefits of which can add up over years and make a real difference as the subjects age.
Better nutrition and more movement lowers the odds of diabetes, hypertension, heart conditions, and a variety of joint ailments and inflammation that yield additional nasty co-morbidities in late middle age. More quality sleep can stave off dementia and brain aging, and improve your memory and executive function. Even better, it really doesn’t take a whole lot for all these benefits to start kicking in. In fact, those modest changes seen thanks to the bots’ assistance is plenty to build on and delay the worst effects of aging, yielding a higher quality of life for those who use them until the extra steps, and greens, and sleep become second nature.
Why are the bots so effective? Well, the current thought is that they can figure out the best approach to motivate their users and adjust on the fly based on the results. It’s a game of data collection, persistence, and gentle but relentless nudging, something at which machines excel. With every success, they can slowly push just a little more and get the users to try just a little harder while making sure they’re not discouraged. A lot more study still needs to be done, but this is a promising result which shows that well trained chat bots under the strict supervision of experts can really help with ordinarily exhausting and frustrating lifestyle interventions doctors often recommend.
Typically, those interventions sound and feel like a lot even though they don’t have to be, and motivation can quickly fade if the methods being used are unsustainable, like crash diets or overzealous exercise that result in injuries and raging hanger. (No, that last one was not a typo.) By starting out low and slow, and steadily experimenting with habits which are easy to maintain thanks to the gentle advice from chat bots that give the patients more and more chances, variety, and approaches, the whole process is a lot more forgiving and gives people more chances to recover and things to try if they fail along the way. This is why these small but persistent results are so encouraging.
See: Singh, B., et al. (2023) Systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of chatbots on lifestyle behaviors. NPJ Digit. Med. 6, 118, DOI: 10.1038/s41746-023-00856-1