Go to 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 fee and blood oxygen, provide 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, based on the heartbeat oximeter, wonderful.

The US Meals and Drug Administration remains to be attempting to determine what to do about this downside. Final week, an FDA advisory committee met to mull over higher methods to judge the efficiency of those units in individuals with quite a lot of pores and skin tones. However engineers have been desirous about this downside too. Cassandra Willyard has dug into why they’re biased and what technological fixes is likely to be doable. Check out what she came upon.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and well being publication. Join 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/vital/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 challenge. (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 corporate has hurtled previous the $2 billion income mark. (FT $)
+ Why China is betting large on chiplets. (MIT Know-how Evaluation)

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 maintain coming, although. (TechCrunch)
+ Iranian hackers infiltrated UAE streaming companies with a deepfake newsreader. (The Guardian)