Alexa, What Should I Eat? : A Personalized Virtual Nutrition Coach for Native American Diabetes Patients Using Amazon’s Smart Speaker Technology

Native Americans are disproportionately affected by diabetes and diabetes complications. To control this disease, self-management, especially diet management is very important. There have appeared many electronic tools to help diabetic patients to manage their diet and control their blood glucose level. However, due to their lack of consideration of the special requirement of this ethical group, these tools are not well-accepted by Native American communities. In this paper, we propose a culturally appropriate tool to help this population to manage their disease. Specifically, we propose a voice-based Artificial Intelligence-powered virtual assistant to help Native American diabetic patients to manage their daily diet, and to learn food and nutrition-related knowledge. Voice is the most natural communication modality and it is easy to use without any technical background. In addition, the communication and recommendation provided by the system are personalized based on each user’s physical, social, and cultural profile. Therefore, it would be easy to be accepted by the target audience. The proposed virtual assistant has been implemented on the Amazon Alexa platform. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated the usefulness of the virtual assistant.