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AI-powered culinary coach wins Ascensia Diabetes Challenge
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ORLANDO, Fla. — The winner of the Ascensia Diabetes Challenge, a global competition seeking innovative, digital strategies for managing type 2 diabetes, is U.K.-based Whisk, for Culinary Coach that uses artificial intelligence to provide a personalized food experience for patients with diabetes.
The Whisk platform is an AI-powered nutrition platform that enables users to browse recipes based on factors include personal taste preferences, time constraints, budget, weather, and dietary restrictions or allergies. When a user adds a recipe to their meal plan, it can automatically be added to an online shopping cart at some of the world’s leading grocery retailers, including Walmart, Tesco and Amazon Fresh, allowing users to purchase the recipe ingredients, according to a press release.
Whisk plans to create a personalized food experience for people with type 2 diabetes that will learn from their blood glucose readings and make food recommendations that are more tailored to their own diabetes. Based on readings from Ascensia’s blood glucose monitoring systems, the AI will monitor how a user’s blood glucose readings react to specific foods, with a goal to build a tailored meal plan for their diabetes to help keep blood glucose in range. The Culinary Coach will begin by providing personalized recipe recommendations and in the future will develop to suggest convenience foods and restaurant options, according to the release.
“If we can find people the right recipe and take out the friction of that process of answering the question ‘what’s for dinner?’ then we can help people enjoy making that behavior change and help them eat better food,” Stuart Renshaw, chief commercial officer at Whisk, said during a media briefing during the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions. “Most people are balancing within their family and within their cooking requirements things like pescatarian choices, they might be on a budget, they could be under time pressure. There’s a lot of competing factors here. And when you throw in an extra complexity like diabetes into the mix, it becomes a very complicated thing to actually to find the right recipe for the right moment.”
The winner of the Ascensia Diabetes Challenge was selected from 116 entries from 25 countries. Whisk will receive a cash prize to build and pilot its AI-powered platform for patients with diabetes, in collaboration with Ascensia Diabetes Care. The entries came from both entrepreneurs and start-ups around the world.
As previously reported by Endocrine Today , in addition to the Whisk platform, the finalists included Glycoleap by Holmusk, a program that combines human coaching with mobile technology; QStream by Harvard Medical, an online education platform that uses gamification to change patient behavior; My Diabetes Coach by Macadamian, a tool that uses Amazon’s Alexa for virtual coaching; Path Feel by Walk with Path, an insole that provides feedback while the wearer is walking; and xBird, a software that combines historical blood glucose data and user movements to predict hypoglycemic and hyperglycemic events.
QStream by Harvard Medical and xBird were named runners-up during the award ceremony and will also receive a cash prize to continue their work. Ascensia also recognized and announced it will continue to support Walk with Path to conduct a proof-of-concept study of the insole in patients with peripheral neuropathy due to diabetes, according to the release.
“Behavior change is a big factor in helping patients manage their diabetes, and digital solutions offer us a way in which we can start to address that very difficult problem,” Jazz Panchoo, global franchise head at Ascensia Diabetes Care, said during the briefing. “I think that, clearly, when we’re looking at solutions which impact behavior change, if the patient isn’t front and center of that solution, then it’s going to fail. ... In terms of what we were trying to do here, it was about looking at solutions which enabled us to, No. 1, find innovation, but No. 2, [find innovations] that were really focused around the patient.
“Overall, the rationale for this is quite simple: there is a global epidemic of diabetes that’s continuing,” Panchoo said. “When you look at how health care systems are trying to address this, digital solutions are one way in which, we believe, the needs of patients with diabetes could potentially be met more broadly, but also in a more affordable way.” – by Melissa J. Webb