Addressing challenges in promoting healthy lifestyles: the al-chatbot approach

Healthy lifestyles promotion is the main objective of primary care interventions, starting from the pediatric age, were overweight is nowadays exposing about one third of children to the risk of developing chronic diseases, such as diabetes. Recent years have seen a blast of mHealth apps for health promotion, targeting in particular nutrition and dietary behaviour change. However, reviews show difficulties in the adoption and effective usage of these applications in telemedicine and by the population in general, due to a lack of evidence-based content and strategies provided (e.g., by commercial apps) or lack of sufficient user engagement with the apps. Nutrition apps typically require self-reporting of food intake by the user which is often seen as a burden and a cause of abandonment of the app. However, current wave of research has taken up the challenge of promoting healthy lifestyles with advances in artificial intelligence (AI). This paper focus on AI chatbots as an innovative approach offering more simplicity and facilitating long-term adherence to health promotion interventions. Conversational assistants provide the advantage of being deployed in smartphones and laptops within a wide variety of applications. We will particularly focus on harnessing the power of intelligent chatbot systems to provide behaviour change interventions in telemedicine for healthy lifestyle promotion. We describe an application scenario for an AI-chatbot delivering support to nutrition education that could help to overcome current limitations of similar mHealth solutions provided for healthy lifestyles and contribute to more effective public health interventions in this application domain.