Smart Kiosk for Nutritional Management of People With Diabetes in Underserved Communities: Development and Technical...

Diabetes is a chronic disease with a high global prevalence, increasing from 200 million people in 1990 to 830 million in 2022, with a higher burden in low- and middle-income regions and high mortality in Mexico and Veracruz. These inequalities limit access to treatment and nutritional education, requiring technological solutions such as interactive kiosks based on artificial intelligence (AI) that contribute to the nutritional management of people with diabetes in marginalized communities.

This study aimed to design and evaluate an interactive kiosk based on AI that generates culturally relevant and personalized meal plans for people with diabetes in marginalized communities.

A low-cost prototype was developed, with a database of local foods and a multilayer perceptron trained with synthetic data based on national clinical guidelines. Performance was tested through an experimental evaluation that measured (1) the accuracy of nutritional recommendations compared with ideal meal plans (accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and F1-score); (2) performance, measured by recording response time with 1 to 50 simultaneous requests; and (3) usability, assessed using heuristic evaluation and the System Usability Scale (SUS).

The smart kiosk was experimentally evaluated in three dimensions: nutritional recommendations, system efficiency, and usability. The model achieved AI metrics of 87.3% overall accuracy, 90.5% precision, 92.1% sensitivity, and 91.3% F1-score. The average response time was 2.36 (SD 0.24) seconds in all load tests. A maximum time of 4 seconds was obtained in the simulation of 50 concurrent users. In the usability evaluation, an average score of 89 (SD 2.89) out of 100 was obtained on the SUS, which is considered excellent, along with a success rate of 98.3%.

The AI-based kiosk demonstrated technical feasibility, adequate performance, and satisfactory usability. Its ability to operate without the need for internet and its low cost make it an equitable option for diabetes self-management and a replicable model in public health.