Visit any health-care facility, and one of many first issues they’ll do is clip a pulse oximeter to your finger. These units, which monitor coronary heart charge and blood oxygen, provide important details about an individual’s well being.
But they’re additionally flawed. For folks with darkish pores and skin, pulse oximeters can overestimate simply how a lot oxygen their blood is carrying. That signifies that an individual with dangerously low oxygen ranges may appear, in keeping with the heartbeat oximeter, superb.
The US Food and Drug Administration continues to be attempting to determine what to do about this drawback. Last week, an FDA advisory committee met to mull over higher methods to judge the efficiency of those units in folks with quite a lot of pores and skin tones. But engineers have been fascinated about this drawback too. Cassandra Willyard has dug into why they’re biased and what technological fixes is likely to be attainable. Take a have a look at what she came upon.
This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and well being e-newsletter. Sign up to obtain it in your inbox each Thursday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the web to search out you right this moment’s most enjoyable/necessary/scary/fascinating tales about know-how.
1 OpenAI is planning to show the chip business on its head
By sinking trillions of {dollars} into an bold new mission. (WSJ $)
+ AMD additionally has plans to interrupt Nvidia’s chip chokehold. (Economist $)
+ OpenAI’s COO is molding the startup right into a industrial powerhouse. (Bloomberg $)
+ The firm has hurtled previous the $2 billion income mark. (FT $)
+ Why China is betting large on chiplets. (MIT Technology Review)
2 US regulators have outlawed AI-generated robocalls
In a bid to get forward of audio deepfakes disrupting the Presidential election. (AP News)
+ That doesn’t imply the calls received’t maintain coming, although. (TechCrunch)
+ Iranian hackers infiltrated UAE streaming companies with a deepfake newsreader. (The Guardian)