Gut health isn’t the most glamorous of topics, but as many as 1 in 10 people regularly suffer from gastric symptoms like nausea, bloating, or cramping after eating. Figuring out exactly what’s causing stomach misery is not easy without invasive tests. But New Zealand-based startup Alimetry has developed a wearable device that can speed up diagnosis of functional gastric issues.

The noninvasive wearable consists of a flexible electrode array that’s applied to the patient’s stomach where it’s able to pick up electrical activity produced by their gut. Cloud-based analysis — including the use of artificial intelligence to help extract signal from digestive noise — turns the captured data into useful clinical biomarkers to support patient diagnosis.

The startup has just taken in a second tranche of Series A funding — $18 million, led by VC firm GD1 — on top of roughly $10 million it pulled in through an earlier Series A raise in 2021. It also raised seed funding back in 2019 the year it was founded.

Listen to your gut

“It’s much like the heart; the gut runs on a natural electricity, and that electricity causes it to move,” explains co-founder and CEO Dr. Greg O’Grady. “Those electrical rhythms and currents are really weak. They’re about 100 times weaker than the heart, which makes it really difficult to detect them.

“People have known about them for a long time, but no one’s been able to get at it reliably for clinical use — unlike the heart, which is obviously very mature and a huge industry now — and so the secret to cracking it has been taking a really high-resolution approach. And it’s only really been recently, through advances in stretchable electronics, wearables, and in AI, that we have really cracked the code to make this possible.”

To use the device, a patient attends a clinic where Alimetry’s device is applied and a benchmark recording of their gut activity is taken. They remain in situ while they consume a light meal still wearing the device, allowing data to be captured as their stomach works. The patient also logs any symptoms they experience in Alimetry’s app during the test.

The entire session (from benchmark to active gut recording) lasts a few hours, after which the device is removed, and Alimetry’s analysis of the data is sent to their doctor as a downloadable report to support diagnosis.

O’Grady says the data it presents enables clinicians to determine which phenotypes (or descriptive categories) apply to their patient’s condition to help personalize treatment.

“One of the main things we can do, for example, that’s unique to what we do, is we can diagnose whether a patient has a true gastric neuromuscular disorder or not, and completely noninvasively,” he tells TechCrunch, saying this is a major advance for diagnostics of functional gastric complaints.

The startup is using a “very high density” array of 64 electrodes to dial up its ability to capture stomach activity. The array itself is a single-use device but another component of Alimetry’s product (the reader) can be cleaned and reused after each patient use.

Alimetry’s business model entails selling the hardware to hospitals. Currently it does not have any software or licensing fees on top of that, but that may change as it continues to develop the product and add more features.

FDA approvals

Alimetry has been testing its “gastric alimetry” wearable with more than 30 hospitals in the U.S. market, the U.K., and New Zealand for several years. It’s also obtained four clearances from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for the device to be used as a diagnostic aid; the company will be applying for more approvals as it continues to evolve the product.

The startup thinks its technology could have additional uses to support diagnostics in pediatrics and for issues affecting the colon. But its first product is focused on stomach complaints. “It’s a brand-new class of technologies, and we’ve been developing it really fast,” O’Grady says, adding: “As we discover new features, we put them through the FDA as soon as possible, then make them into the product. And we’re definitely not done.”

He says the (recent) addition of AI-based data processing has greatly enhanced its ability to pluck useful signal from gastric noise.

“We had a huge number of algorithms that would filter and process and analyze that data and present it to the clinician, and it only became possible once we’d done that a few thousand times that we could use the AI,” he says. “And it’s dramatically impressive how superior [it is] — we thought our algorithms were already excellent, but it’s really been, you know, almost surprising how dramatically superior they are at eliminating noise through that training process. But it required a very large dataset [before we could train neural networks].”

The version of the product that incorporates AI will be submitted to the FDA for approval next quarter, per O’Grady.

Building utility

While Alimetry’s wearable could be a boon for diagnosis of functional gastric disorders, like chronic nausea, O’Grady confirms that this noninvasive “body surface gastric mapping” approach is not going to be able to help with chasing down the cause of every type of gut health issue. But it could still help doctors narrow down the list of potential causes of stomach complaints.

“We don’t have all of the answers within that category,” he says. “For example, we don’t detect things like the microbiome and influences that can have and immune reactions and so on. And so there’s always going to be a range of patients who require other testing.”

“That’s the way it is with the gut,” he adds. “It’s a pretty complex system, but we know that there’s a very large number of patients within that functional group who we can significantly help.”

Asked whether Alimetry’s wearable technology could automate diagnosis of relevant health complaints in the future, O’Grady reckons it will be possible — although such a product would require a likely higher risk class of regulatory approval. For now, the device sits firmly in the clinician support category with human doctors in the loop.

The startup’s Series A2 funding will be used for the next stage of commercialization as it seeks to build on a controlled market release it started in 2022 by getting more hospitals regularly using its kit to support diagnosis of neuromuscular gut disorders, sensory disorders, and gut-brain disorders.

“We’re opening ourselves up to more hospitals,” he says, stressing that expanding access will be more gradual, rather than a big bang. “We work closely with the hospitals to make sure that the reimbursement billing is successful, and that requires quite a bit of effort at the moment. And once those barriers start to come down, then we will be spreading out — but we’ve got a reimbursement code that came through in July, a CPT III code, that’s specific to this device, and that’s going well.”

The U.S. market will remain the company’s main focus as it continues its commercialization journey, per O’Grady. Thus far, Alimetry has about 4,000 tests recorded — but the medtech will be hoping to build on that by reaching many more patients in the coming years.

Commenting on the device in a supporting statement, Dr. Bu’ Hayee, a professor of gastroenterology at King’s College London, said the wearable is “transforming how we approach patients with various gastric disorders,” adding: “It’s difficult not to get over-excited about this.”

Other investors in Alimetry’s A2 funding round are AGA Ventures (the fund of the American Gastroenterological Association), Icehouse Ventures, and Olympus Innovation Ventures, along with follow-on from existing investors. 

OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December, The Verge has learned.

Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally. As always, the release plan is subject to change and could slip. OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Orion has been teased by an OpenAI executive as potentially up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4; it’s separate from the o1 reasoning model OpenAI released in September. The company’s goal is to combine its LLMs over time to create an even more capable model that could eventually be called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

It was previously reported that OpenAI was using o1, code named Strawberry, to provide synthetic data to train Orion. In September, OpenAI researchers threw a happy hour to celebrate finishing training the new model, a source familiar with the matter tells The Verge.

That timing lines up with a cryptic post on X by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which he said he was “excited for the winter constellations to rise soon.” If you ask ChatGPT o1-preview what Altman’s post is hiding, it will tell you that he’s hinting at the word Orion, which is the winter constellation that’s most visible in the night sky from November to February (but it also hallucinates that you can rearrange the letters to spell “ORION”).

The release of this next model comes at a crucial time for OpenAI, which just closed a historic $6.6 billion funding round that requires the company to restructure itself as a for-profit entity. The company is also experiencing significant staff turnover: CTO Mira Murati just announced her departure along with Bob McGrew, the company’s chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, VP of post training.

If Batman: Arkham Shadow is tempting you to finally pick up a Meta Quest 3 or Meta Quest 3S, or you already own one of Meta’s best VR headsets, then this might sweeten the deal. Meta has revealed the dates of the 52 free NBA and WNBA matches it’s hosting in Horizon Worlds for the 2024-2025 season.

To catch you up to speed, Meta allows its headset owners (in supported regions) to jump into the NBA Arena in Horizon Worlds to virtually sit courtside during live matches. If you miss the game, you can also tune into immersive highlights for 24 hours after the game has ended. Additionally, you can play mini-games and hang out with friends like you would in other Horizon Worlds.

“While both public and private sectors face cyber security challenges, the public sector tends to be more exposed to the threats in an ever-evolving landscape,” consultancy major KPMG said in a recent report. A Palo Alto study last year said that 67 per cent of Indian government and critical public sector installations had a 50 per cent increase in cyber attacks

It is no exaggeration. From the country’s premier medical institution—the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) came under not one, but two malware attacks over the course of one year—to premier banks losing money, India, and particularly its public sector, remain vulnerable to cyber crimes in what is one of the top five cyber attacked countries in the world.

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“India’s public sector is the Achilles’ heel of our national cyber security,” said Trishneet Arora, founder and CEO of the cyber security company TAC Securities. “The absence of an actionable risk management system and outdated infrastructure leave critical systems vulnerable to cyber threats.”

Banks, including public sector banks, are a particularly high-value target. According to data, there were 248 successful breaches of Indian banks by cyber attackers in the four year period between 2018 and 2022, primarily card information leakage and theft. However, in a serious incident in November last year, UCO Bank had reported erroneous crediting of more than 800 crore rupees via IMPS. The bank later managed to recover nearly 80 per cent of the amount through actions like freezing accounts.

After a cyber security and information technology examination, or CSITE, identified vulnerabilities in certain Indian banks, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had in March this year cautioned banks to adopt cyber security measures. RBI’s deputy governor T. Rabi Sankar, speaking at a banking conference in February, had called on banks to upgrade their encryption systems to counter artificial intelligence (AI)-spawned attacks.

RBI has also instituted a dedicated Cyber Security Framework for Scheduled Commercial Banks.

For India’s public sector undertakings (PSU), the problems stem from “legacy systems, staff training, bureaucratic complexities, relying on third parties, difficulties in continuous monitoring and real-time threat detection (and) cultural resistance to change, scarcity of specialised cyber security personnel…(all) leaving these institutions vulnerable to evolving cyber risks,” according to Ruchin Kumar, vice president (South Asia) of Futurex, a US-based cyber security company.

So what can be done? Modernising IT infra and complying to cyber security regulations would be a no-brainer, but many PSUs still don’t allocate enough budget, or specialised personnel, for this. “Furthermore, strengthening third-party and supply chain security, promoting inter-agency collab and enhancing threat detection capabilities are vital components of this approach,” added Ruchin Kumar. With cyber threats always evolving, it is imperative that PSUs invest in continuous monitoring tools and stay updated. They also need to enhance security by following government updates, including encryption and tokenisation to protect sensitive data, as well as deploying hardware security modules (HSMs) to manage and protect cryptographic keys.

ALSO READ | ‘Data breach, ransomware threats amount to cyberattack on India, not trolling Prime Minister or LoP online’

The situation is even more critical for public sector banks, as they deal in millions of financial transactions daily. “Cyber criminals obtain data from social networks and are also learning new technologies to make cyber attacks,” pointed out Rajendra K. Sinha, professor and chairperson, Centre of Excellence in Banking, JAGSoM. “Further, they use methods that are not easily detected by endpoint protection code.”

So what can the hapless ordinary citizen who is a bank customer do? Sinha has some tips in addition to training and awareness of bank staff and customers. “Precautionary measures include changing passwords regularly with strong password, removing personal information from social media, and not opening emails from an unknown source.”

Google Photos is undoubtedly one of the best photo management apps, thanks to new and enhanced features. That said, it can’t clearly tell if an image has AI edits. Earlier this month, some reports hinted that Google Photos would soon help identify AI-generated images. Now, the company announced that Google Photos will soon tell you if an image has been through AI edits.

Google Photos’ “AI Info” section will clearly label images with AI edits

Starting next week, Google Photos will clearly label images that went through edits using AI tools like Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, and Zoom Enhance. Google, in the announcement post, says that it is making this change to increase transparency and help users understand more about AI-edited images. With the growing popularity of Gen AI tools, this move was much needed.

While the metadata of an image file used to include the use of AI, it wasn’t easily accessible to users. However, that’ll change starting next week. Google Photos will include a new “AI Info” section alongside image details like file name, backup status, and location. This will allow users to easily know if AI has altered the images.

The new section will be available on Google Photos web and mobile app

It’s worth noting that Google Photos will label the edits involving generative AI. That’s not all, Google also says “We will also use IPTC metadata to indicate when an image is composed of elements from different photos using non-generative features.” Here, Google is referring to “Best Take” and “Add Me” features.

The “AI Info” section will be visible in the image details view of the Google Photos web and mobile app. While this is a welcome change, Google has yet to come up with something that will let users immediately identify AI-edited images.