Go to any health-care facility, and one of many first issues they’ll do is clip a pulse oximeter to your finger. These gadgets, which observe coronary heart price and blood oxygen, supply important details about an individual’s well being.
However 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 implies that an individual with dangerously low oxygen ranges might sound, in keeping with the heart beat oximeter, high quality.
The US Meals and Drug Administration remains to be making an attempt to determine what to do about this drawback. Final week, an FDA advisory committee met to mull over higher methods to judge the efficiency of those gadgets in folks with a wide range of pores and skin tones. However engineers have been excited about this drawback too. Cassandra Willyard has dug into why they’re biased and what technological fixes is perhaps potential. Check out what she came upon.
This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and well being e-newsletter. Enroll to obtain it in your inbox each Thursday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the web to seek out you immediately’s most enjoyable/necessary/scary/fascinating tales about expertise.
1 OpenAI is planning to show the chip trade on its head
By sinking trillions of {dollars} into an bold new challenge. (WSJ $)
+ AMD additionally has plans to interrupt Nvidia’s chip chokehold. (Economist $)
+ OpenAI’s COO is molding the startup right into a business powerhouse. (Bloomberg $)
+ The corporate has hurtled previous the $2 billion income mark. (FT $)
+ Why China is betting huge on chiplets. (MIT Expertise Overview)
2 US regulators have outlawed AI-generated robocalls
In a bid to get forward of audio deepfakes disrupting the Presidential election. (AP Information)
+ That doesn’t imply the calls gained’t preserve coming, although. (TechCrunch)
+ Iranian hackers infiltrated UAE streaming providers with a deepfake newsreader. (The Guardian)
