According to the Russian Ministry of Health, over 5 million Russian citizens have been diagnosed with diabetes. Despite significant advances in medical science, the disease takes the lives of tens of thousands of people every year. Even though diabetes is incurable, timely treatment can allow patients to resume their lives as usual.
The new AI chatbot, Diabotik, developed by ITMO and Diabetes Foundation, is meant to help provide information on the disease to those affected by it and their families. Based on the ChatGPT model, the bot answers queries using verified data provided by the Diabetes Foundation (a charity organization assisting people with diabetes – Ed.). The developers, however, point out that the bot cannot replace a professional medical consultation or prescribe treatments.
Apart from providing verified information, the bot can help users during emergencies by sharing their location and requesting help in the event that a user suddenly runs out of insulin. Other users located nearby who have agreed to receive alerts will be notified. This option is a more efficient alternative to local group chats. For safety purposes, users can choose to indicate a general area or a public meeting place rather than their precise location.
Diabotik was created by Nikita Gorbunov, Semyon Mynko, and Daria Arestova, students of the online Master’s program AI Talent Hub, which is co-developed by ITMO and Napoleon IT. The program offers students great freedom in their choice of practical training, as they can join any project registered within Talent Matcher, a dedicated service used by companies and mentors. One such project, an online information service for people affected by diabetes, was suggested by the Diabetes Foundation.
“For our practical training, we wanted to participate in a charity project instead of a startup or a commercial case. That’s why we created this service and minimized its expenses by optimizing the architecture. Our goal was to create a system that truly helps people instead of profiting off of their problems,” shares Nikita Gorbunov, one of the bot’s developers and a student of AI Talent Hub.
Compared to its analogs that operate on subscriptions or monetize user access, Diabotik is completely free; all expenses (under several thousand rubles a month) are covered by the Diabetes Foundation. Such low maintenance expenses are the result of an optimized architecture – the team has developed a new approach within the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique. With it, the search is more precise and less resource-demanding, which means less required server power and thus cheaper maintenance costs.
“The foundation has a large VK community of people with diabetes who need up-to-date, verified information about their condition. That’s why, together with the students, we came up with a chatbot that will be able to provide such data and help users reach out for help anywhere in Russia. At the core of the service is a database of scientifically verified medical data from an endocrinology website, as well as replies from clinicians participating in our Q&A project. Diabotik is the only free service in Russia that offers 24/7 informational support for people with diabetes and their families,” says Timur Nikolaev, the head of the Diabetes Foundation.
The chatbot has already been launched and is now being tested by its first users. In the coming months, the team will be collecting feedback, improving existing features, and adding new ones.
