Academician Jia Weiping's team publishes research results on VR exercise intervention for obese adolescents and AI personalized exercise prescriptions

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+1 Academician Jia Weiping: Deep integration of digital medicine and artificial intelligence helps metabolic disease treatment enter a new era of precision medicine. The Paper reporter Ji Jingjie 2026-10-23 13:46 Source: The Paper ∙ Life Sciences > Listen to full text Font size

With changes in modern lifestyles, metabolic diseases represented by diabetes and obesity are becoming a severe challenge threatening national health. Currently, China's overweight and obese population has reached 445 million, and diabetes patients number as many as 148 million. Although "control your mouth and move your legs" is known to everyone, it is often difficult to persist with in practice. Entering the era of artificial intelligence and digitalization, how will cutting-edge technology empower chronic disease prevention and treatment and open up a new path for traditional medical intervention?

On October 22, at the 21st "Blue Huangpu River" Academic Annual Conference held at Shanghai Modu Space, Jia Weiping, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chair professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, delivered a keynote report titled "Digital Empowerment, Precision Exercise and Metabolic Disease Health," sharing the latest breakthroughs made by her team using digital means such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality (VR) in adolescent weight loss and improvements in metabolism and brain health. She pointed out that digitally empowered precision exercise can not only achieve efficient fat loss and muscle gain, but also significantly improve brain cognitive function, bringing a deeper paradigm innovation to chronic disease prevention and treatment.

"The obesity rate among Chinese children and adolescents has risen rapidly in recent years, but children are still in their growth and development period. They cannot adopt the strict fasting methods used for adults, and they are prone to developing inferiority complexes due to obesity and unwillingness to exercise, and even cognitive function may be affected," Jia Weiping pointed out. How to use interest-driven approaches to make obese adolescents actively move their legs has long been a difficult problem for the global medical community.

If they are unwilling to exercise in reality, can VR be used to build a virtual exercise system to help obese children lose weight through immersive games? Jia Weiping's team, together with teams from Shanghai University of Sport, the Artificial Intelligence Institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and others, carried out the world's first rigorous clinical trial of virtual reality exercise intervention for obese adolescents.

The research team used motion modeling of professional athletes to build a virtual exercise game, and the system can perform adaptive optimization according to individual conditions. The trial divided subjects into a real exercise group (playing real football and table tennis on site) and a VR exercise group (wearing VR devices to carry out virtual exercise in a small space).

Results after 8 weeks of intervention showed that children who "played games" while wearing VR glasses in a confined space lost an average of 4.28 kilograms in body weight, close to the 5-kilogram weight loss in the real exercise group, and their liver enzyme indicators improved significantly, with blood lipids markedly reduced. This fully proves that VR virtual exercise has tangible physiological intervention effects in reducing fat and lowering glucose, and the adolescents who underwent the intervention showed significantly improved self-esteem and well-being, and even spontaneously changed their dietary preferences, shifting from a fondness for fried and high-sugar foods to preferring light diets.

"Tests showed that the children's cognitive speed increased by as much as 21%," Jia Weiping explained. VR exercise requires subjects to simultaneously immerse themselves in a multidimensional audiovisual environment and respond. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results showed that the VR exercise group showed improvements in neuroplasticity and functional reorganization in brain regions such as the left superior frontal gyrus, which are related to smell, emotional regulation and working memory.

Jia Weiping emphasized that exercise intervention must never be "one size fits all," but must move toward personalized customization.

She mentioned that obesity among Chinese people is mostly central obesity with a big belly and thin limbs, with fat mainly accumulating in the viscera, and cardiovascular and metabolic risks are extremely high. Although the currently popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs can effectively reduce weight, they also lead to massive loss of skeletal muscle and are difficult to sustain.

In response to this pain point, Jia Weiping's team also developed a personalized exercise prescription system based on cardiorespiratory endurance, muscle strength and multi-omics assessment.

In this clinical study targeting patients with type 2 diabetes, the team used AI algorithms to precisely combine individuals' cardiorespiratory function and muscle status and formulated a 16-week combined aerobic and resistance training program. Results showed that subjects' abdominal visceral fat decreased significantly, lower-limb skeletal muscle mass and endurance improved markedly, and glycated hemoglobin decreased significantly.

Using AI multi-omics analysis, the team screened out 27 serum differential proteins related to improvements in body composition, of which as many as 16 were directly related to changes in activity in cognitive brain regions, once again confirming that scientific and precise exercise can economically and effectively strengthen the brain's task coordination efficiency.

Jia Weiping said that with the deep integration of digital medicine and artificial intelligence, future metabolic disease prevention and treatment will undergo a reconstruction of underlying logic: "In the future, doctors will not only need to carry a tape measure to measure waist circumference and use a glucose meter to measure indicators, but also need to be equipped with cognitive function assessment tools. We must move from simply focusing on traditional glucose and lipid metabolism to comprehensively entering a new era of precision medicine that takes into account coordinated improvements in metabolism and brain health." Responsible editor: Huan Yanhong Image editor: Shen Ke Proofreader: Zhang Yan The Paper tip-off: 021-962866 The Paper, unauthorized reproduction prohibited +1 Favorite I want to report #Obesity #AdolescentObesity #VirtualReality #JiaWeiping View more