Estimating Medical Cost Savings from Supporting Health Behavior Using AI and ICT in Japan

The fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and information and communication technology (ICT) are currently witnessing remarkable progress, and they are now being applied to systems that encourage people to engage in voluntary health promotion behaviors. In the future, health intervention systems will likely be replaced by AI. The development of such AI-based health intervention systems is still in its infancy, however, and there is little evidence of their effectiveness. The purpose of this study is to estimate the macro health care cost savings that would result from the widespread use of AI-based health intervention systems. This study to estimates the healthcare cost reductions that could be achieved if AI interventions were to spread and the number of obese people were to decrease, based on the estimates of Okaniwa and Yoshida (2020). It was estimated that AI interventions could reduce medical costs for diabetes and hypertensive diseases by 8.2% and 7.2%, respectively. The findings of this paper could contribute to providing preliminary material for new developments in future research in this field.