Tertiary hospitals in Korea and clinics have invested a lot in IT systems to enhance the convenience and quality of medical services but individuals still lack access to managing their own health, noted Kakao Healthcare CEO Hwang Hee.

Kakao, known for its strength as a tech company, will focus on mobile-based, hyper-personalised healthcare, digital transformation for hospitals and clinics, and management of data based on large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, he noted.

His comments came when he spoke about future digital healthcare services at Medical Korea 2023 in COEX, southern Seoul, Thursday.

In particular, he mentioned two projects, Project Gamma and Project Delta, to be developed this year for glucose monitoring and big data management.

Korea has 5.7 million diabetic patients and 15 million pre-diabetic patients, roughly averaging 40 percent of the population suffering from diabetic health problems, he said. 

According to OECD statistics, diabetes is also the No.1 health expenditure around the world.

Thus, Kakao Healthcare’s goal is to enable continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), he said.

“New CGM tools will soon be launched on the domestic market and Kakao wants to help patients decipher the data and figure out what they need to change in their daily routines using our IoT sensors and AI vision," noted Hwang.

Taking it a step further, Kakao plans to combine this with generative AI to nudge patients to change routines, with real-time feedback on their habits.

Delaying the transition to the pre-diabetic situation and stabilizing blood glucose levels of diabetic patients for more than five years can lead to huge health and economic benefits, Hwang said. Then, the company could expand its business to hyperlipidemia and hypertension, he said.

Project Delta aims to target concerns surrounding accessing data and integrating it with other systems.

In particular, this will help researchers of pharmaceuticals and AI start-ups access medical data as hospitals and clinics are concerned about data leakage when sharing data, he said.

“Our solution to this is ‘federated learning’ benchmarked from Google, whereby Kakao Healthcare will provide virtual machines, cloud computing, federated learning, data linked systems, differential privacy, and blockchain services,” said Hwang. “Data itself is meaningless if accumulated but becomes valuable when connected and used for services and we plan to connect these two projects to enable personalized medicine targeting various diseases starting with diabetes.”