Home Technology The Obtain: easy methods to enhance pulse oximeters, and OpenAI’s chip plans

The Obtain: easy methods to enhance pulse oximeters, and OpenAI’s chip plans

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The Obtain: easy methods to enhance pulse oximeters, and OpenAI’s chip plans


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 monitor coronary heart price and blood oxygen, provide very important details about an individual’s well being.

However they’re additionally flawed. For individuals 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 response to the heartbeat oximeter, effective.

The US Meals and Drug Administration remains to be making an attempt to determine what to do about this downside. Final week, an FDA advisory committee met to mull over higher methods to guage the efficiency of those gadgets in individuals with quite a lot of pores and skin tones. However engineers have been fascinated by this downside too. Cassandra Willyard has dug into why they’re biased and what technological fixes may be doable. Check out what she discovered.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and well being publication. Enroll to obtain it in your inbox each Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the web to search out you at the moment’s most enjoyable/necessary/scary/fascinating tales about know-how.

1 OpenAI is planning to show the chip trade on its head
By sinking trillions of {dollars} into an bold new undertaking. (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 large on chiplets. (MIT Know-how Assessment)

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 received’t preserve coming, although. (TechCrunch)
+ Iranian hackers infiltrated UAE streaming providers with a deepfake newsreader. (The Guardian)