Research progress and prospects of AI+ weight control

Obesity/overweight has become a complex metabolic disease involving multiple systems, and the traditional model of relying on outpatient follow-up and short-term weight loss is difficult to solve the problems of insufficient prediction, extensive intervention, poor adherence and unequal resources. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI/ML), large language models (LLM/GPT), Internet of Things (IoT), metaverse and digital humans have been introduced into the whole chain of weight management: in the prevention stage, multimodal risk models and wearable devices achieve early identification and behavior warning of high-risk groups, and metaverse scenarios improve health education and participation; In the diagnostic stage, AI supports obesity phenotype reconstruction, automatic body composition analysis, and complication “red light signal” recognition, promoting weight control from “BMI-centric” to “phenotype and complication-centric”; In the treatment and rehabilitation stage, AI-assisted accurate benefit prediction of weight loss drugs such as GLP-1, personalized push of digital therapy and behavioral coaching, full-process risk assessment of metabolic surgery, and promotion of functional recovery and anti-obesity through VR/GDTx and digital twins. At the management level, a comprehensive platform based on cloud-edge-end architecture and embedded with 5P medical concepts has been formed, and medical GPT/BAIMGPT connects doctors, patients and managers as a “weight loss digital human expert”. The main challenges include data quality and generalization, fairness and privacy protection, clinical process and payment model adaptation, and GPT security regulation. Looking forward to the future, the deep integration of AI, digital twins, and the metaverse is expected to achieve systematic improvement from simple “weight loss” to “metabolic health and self-management ability”.

Key Words: weight control; AI; Internet of Things; medical GPT; metaverse