Building a Personalized Messaging System for Health Intervention in Underprivileged Regions Using Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

This work builds an effective AI-based message generation system for diabetes prevention in rural areas, where the diabetes rate has been increasing at an alarming rate. The messages contain information about diabetes causes and complications and the impact of nutrition and fitness on preventing diabetes. We propose to apply reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize our message selection policy over time, tailoring our messages to align with each individual participant's needs and preferences. We conduct an extensive field study in a large country in Asia which involves more than 1000 participants who are local villagers and they receive messages generated by our system, over a period of six months. Our analysis shows that with the use of AI, we can deliver significant improvements in the participants' diabetes-related knowledge, physical activity levels, and high-fat food avoidance, when compared to a static message set. Furthermore, we build a new neural network based behavior model to predict behavior changes of participants, trained on data collected during our study. By exploiting underlying characteristics of health-related behavior, we manage to significantly improve the prediction accuracy of our model compared to baselines.