The UK health secretary, Sajid Javid, has announced a review into systemic racism and gender bias in medical devices in response to concerns it could contribute to poorer outcomes for women and people of colour. Writing in the Sunday Times, Javid said: "It is easy to look at a machine and assume that everyone's getting the same experience. But technologies are created and developed by people, and so bias, however inadvertent, can be an issue here too." We take a look at some of the gadgets used in healthcare where concerns over racial bias have been raised. Oximeters estimate the amount of oxygen in a person's blood, and are a crucial tool in determining which Covid patients may need hospital care – not least because some can have dangerously low levels of oxygen without realising.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and now a group of developers have created AI software that can tell whether you are likely to die from Covid-19 using health data. University of Copenhagen researchers fed a computer program with health data from 3,944 Danish COVID-19 patients, as well as any underlying conditions. They then trained it to look for patterns in a patients' prior illness to determine the risk factors and potential outcome from Covid-19 and found that BMI, age and being male were the highest risk factors when it came to the likelihood of dying. The results show that AI can, with up to 90 per cent certainty, determine whether an uninfected person will die of the disease if they are unlucky enough to catch it. Results from the new tool could help health officials determine who should be at the front of the line for a limited supply of vaccines, said lead author Mads Nielsen. They say this should be considered when determining who should get the vaccine first.

Is it an artist thing? That's a lot less than I expected, but I'll make it work. I see him and I hear woodwind instruments. The symmetry of him, the curve of his neck … I must take some sketches, some studies. He has that post-racial skin tone, but I can use it.