As a counterpoint to the raft of wellness-promoting smartwatches, Purdue University and Physiq Inc. have developed a smartwatch algorithm that flags illness. A year after launching their co-development program, the two organizations reported they have created an algorithm designed for smartwatches that enables detection of early signs of infection. The algorithm is already in use in a number of Physiq’s customers’ applications, Physiq Chief Scientific Officer Stephan Wegerich told BioWorld.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has taken a more assertive stance regarding enforcement of several considerations, most conspicuously about mergers and acquisitions. However, the agency’s push for less cumbersome processes has now been applied to a host of considerations pertinent to the life sciences, including bias found in artificial intelligence algorithms, abuse of drug patents, and repairs for medical equipment, a signal that more frequent and more rapid FTC enforcement is on the near horizon.

The question of whether an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm can be an inventor has been making the rounds in the past couple of years, and the question came up again in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Stephen Thaler, who developed the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) algorithm that has been credited with two inventions, failed to persuade the court that an algorithm qualifies as an “individual,” and thus patents must still be assigned to humans, at least where the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is concerned.