Based on your recorded meals, the app predicts your blood sugar response to these foods. It also displays personalized recommendations throughout the day, such as adjusting your portion size, choosing a different food combination, or walking after eating. Users can choose to accept or ignore these suggestions – perhaps broccoli isn’t their favorite food or they prefer to exercise at a certain time of day. The app uses artificial intelligence to adapt to their preferences over time. Users can also chat with trainers if they have specific health questions.
For Buckley, Twin Health has helped him make healthier choices, such as swapping frozen, packaged breakfast sandwiches for homemade breakfast burritos with low-carb, high-fiber wraps. He no longer drinks soda and walks several miles a day.
“When I started the program, I could barely walk a mile because my back and knee started hurting. Now I walk six and a half miles every morning,” he says.
He likes getting instant feedback from the app and also tracking his biometrics over time. He sees his body fat percentage and blood pressure drop.
“This is where I get the motivation to keep walking and keep working,” he says.
Buckley reached his initial weight goal of 300 pounds and is now around 275. After decades of taking blood pressure medications, his doctor recently suggested a lower dose.
When Twin Health approached the Cleveland Clinic about using its program, endocrinologist Kevin Pantalone was initially skeptical. He decided to conduct the test himself.
“We’ve really struggled to make very effective lifestyle modifications. Patients often require multiple therapies to control their diabetes,” he said. “So I was definitely very interested.” Despite age-old advice to simply exercise more and eat healthily, most Americans struggle to get the recommended weekly physical activity and have difficulty following a hearty diet.
Pantalone and colleagues recruited 150 participants with type 2 diabetes, randomly assigning 100 to Twin and the rest to a control group. Study participants were on average 58 years ancient, obese, and had blood glucose (A1C) levels of 7.2%. A level of 6.5 percent or higher indicates diabetes. The aim of the study was to see if participants could achieve an A1C below 6.5% using fewer medications.
After 12 months, 71 percent of study participants using the Twin app achieved these blood sugar levels with fewer medications, while only 2 percent of people in the control group did so. People taking Twin also lost more weight – 8.6 percent of their body weight compared to 4.6 percent in the control group.
At the start of the study, 41 percent of Twin users were taking the GLP-1 drug, but at the end of the study only 6 percent were still taking it. In the control group, 52 percent of participants started taking GLP-1, which increased to 63 percent by the end of the study. Results have been published last year in the Recent England Journal of Medicine Catalyst.