Optimizing type 2 diabetes management: AI-enhanced time series analysis of continuous glucose monitoring data for personalized dietary intervention

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2024 Apr 22:10:e1971. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1971. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Despite advanced health facilities in many developed countries, diabetic patients face multifold health challenges. Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) go along with conspicuous symptoms due to frequent peaks, hypoglycemia <=70 mg/dL (while fasting), or hyperglycemia >=180 mg/dL two hours postprandial, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA)). The worse effects of Type 2 diabetes mellitus are precisely associated with the poor lifestyle adopted by patients. In particular, a healthy diet and nutritious food are the key to success for such patients. This study was done to help T2DM patients improve their health by developing a favorable lifestyle under an AI-assisted Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) digital system. This study aims to reduce the blood glucose level fluctuations of such patients by rectifying their daily diet and maintaining their exertion vs. food consumption records. In this study, a well-precise prediction is obtained by training the ML model on a dataset recorded from CGM sensor devices attached to T2DM patients under observation. As the data obtained from the CGM sensor is time series, to predict blood glucose levels, the time series analysis and forecasting are done with XGBoost, SARIMA, and Prophet. The results of different Models are then compared based on performance metrics. This helped in monitoring various trends, specifically irregular patterns of the patient's glucose data, collected by the CGM sensor. Later, keeping track of these trends and seasonality, the diet is adjusted accordingly by adding or removing particular food and keeping track of its nutrients with the intervention of a commercially available all-in-one AI solution for food recognition. This created an interactive assistive system, where the predicted results are compared to food contents to bring the blood glucose levels within the normal range for maintaining a healthy lifestyle and to alert about blood glucose fluctuations before the time that are going to occur sooner. This study will help T2DM patients get in managing diabetes and ultimately bring HbA1c within the normal range (<= 5.7%) for diabetic and pre-diabetic patients, three months after the intervention.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Diabetes; Diet plan; Digital health; Disease management; Forecasting; Medical informatics; Time series; Wearables; Wellness.

Grants and funding

This work was funded by the Deanship of Scientific Research, Vice Presidency for Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia [INST. 041], through the KFU Annual Institutional Funding Program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.