Wearables and AI dominate a busy week in digital health research

On 1 October STAT reported that the journal Science published a special issue on women's health, edited by an all-female team (Yevgeniya Nusinovich, Sacha Vignieri, Joana Osório and Sarah Ross), who cited political attacks on women's rights and funding cuts as motives. The issue reviews sex-specific mechanisms of pain and the effect of XX and XY chromosomes on aging and disease. According to STAT, women experience functional pain at about twice the rate of men, and the authors wrote that "women are desperately waiting for concrete answers that might help eliminate the common 'all in your head' approach to their illnesses."

That is the newest item in a dossier dominated by wearable and AI health studies, most of them published in the last 72 hours.

The same day, STAT reported that a proposed redesign of the National Health Interview Survey would remove several disability-related questions and cut the adult questionnaire from 482 questions to 150, with about 25,000 households receiving a mailed form. Katy Neas, CEO of the advocacy group The Arc, called the changes a "head-scratcher" and told STAT that "if we don't have the government as a trusted source of data, asking questions about real people and what their real experiences are, we're never going to get better [health outcomes]." A recent paper co-authored by CDC statisticians suggests past surveys may have missed 75% of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

AI in billing, not just in care

CNBC reported on 1 October that the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association estimated hospitals' use of AI-assisted medical coding contributed close to $1 billion ($942 million) in additional costs for its health plans between 2023 and 2025. Luke Chalker, BCBSA's senior vice president of product and data science, told CNBC that roughly 70%, or $653 million, was tied to additional diagnoses not accompanied by a change in care. He stopped short of attributing the entire increase to AI.

Christopher Whaley, a health economist at Brown University, told CNBC that AI appears to be "accelerating, and in some sense making it easier to capture, the existing and underlying billing incentives that are in the system." Endpoints News summarised the same debate bluntly on 1 October: "For all the talk about AI's potential to cut healthcare costs, it seems to be doing the opposite."

Money kept moving elsewhere in digital health. Endpoints News reported exclusively on 1 October that Parakeet Health raised $10 million to automate patient outreach by AI phone calls, texts and emails, and that insurer startup Devoted Health raised nearly $1.2 billion after enrolling hundreds of thousands of new senior members.

On the research side, a small pilot study from UC San Francisco, published 23 September in JAMA Psychiatry and funded by the National Institutes of Health, found that 20 participants who cut ultra-processed food intake by more than 85% showed moderate to large improvements across three depression measures, with anxiety scores improving modestly. Senior author Andrew Krystal said the study "successfully established the viability of carrying out this research in a larger-scale trial."

Separately, a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and Aarhus University, published in JAMA Psychiatry and covered by ScienceDaily, analysed more than 2.1 million children and adolescents in Denmark. It found that children born with low birth weight were 54% more likely to later receive an ADHD or autism diagnosis at the start of the study period, falling to 17% by the end. First author Magnus Elias Tarp said the message is "not that these risk factors are no longer important," but that recently diagnosed people resemble the general population more closely than a decade ago.

Patents, cables and digital sovereignty

Hardware and infrastructure stories filled out the week. The South China Morning Post reported on 1 October that Chinese companies accounted for 44% of the world's drone patent filings in 2024 against 17% for US firms, according to a LexisNexis study, though by value the two countries were roughly level; DJI held only 4% of total patent assets, down from about 24% at the end of 2018. Tom's Hardware reported on 30 September that Xbox's Disc to Digital feature had rolled out to all players, letting them play disc-free, but that selling or giving away the disc can revoke the digital licence.

Data Center Dynamics reported on 1 October that SoftBank closed its purchase of DigitalBridge for approximately $3.1 billion, taking the infrastructure investor private and de-listing it from the NYSE; DigitalBridge manages more than $108 billion in assets. Data Center Knowledge reported on 30 September that Digital Realty plans a cable landing station inside its LAX12 data center in El Segundo, California, with support expected to begin in 2028.

Capgemini Research Institute's report "Digital Sovereignty: From Policy Ambition to Executive Imperative," covered by Il Sole 24 Ore on 1 October, surveyed 1,300 executives at large companies and public bodies. It found 93% had discussed digital sovereignty at board level but 59% considered full sovereignty unrealistic; in Italy, 94% had discussed it at board level and 66% called full sovereignty unrealistic. Monia Ferrari, CEO of Capgemini in Italy, told the paper that "thinking you can eliminate all dependencies is unrealistic."

Two other items sit further back. heise online reported on 1 October that Germany's official certificate of conduct became available as a PDF through the BundID mailbox from 1 October, at the same 13 euro fee as the paper version. And IEEE Spectrum reported on 21 September on HERMES, a shortwave digital radio project from the nonprofit Rhizomatica, which sends encrypted data without satellites or relay towers.