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 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 signifies that an individual with dangerously low oxygen ranges might sound, in accordance to the pulse oximeter, high quality.

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

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 discover you right now’s most enjoyable/necessary/scary/fascinating tales about know-how.

1 OpenAI is planning to flip the chip business on its head
By sinking trillions of {dollars} into an formidable new mission. (WSJ $)
+ AMD additionally has plans to break Nvidia’s chip chokehold. (Economist $)
+ OpenAI’s COO is molding the startup right into a business powerhouse. (Bloomberg $)
+ The firm has hurtled previous the $2 billion income mark. (FT $)
+ Why China is betting massive 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 received’t maintain coming, although. (TechCrunch)
+ Iranian hackers infiltrated UAE streaming companies with a deepfake newsreader. (The Guardian)