Zhu Long, co-founder and CEO of Yitu Technology, has his identity checked at the company's headquarters in the Hongqiao business district in Shanghai. "Our machines can very easily recognise you among at least 2 billion people in a matter of seconds," says chief executive and Yitu co-founder Zhu Long, "which would have been unbelievable just three years ago." Its platform is also in service with more than 20 provincial public security departments, and is used as part of more than 150 municipal public security systems across the country, and Dragonfly Eye has already proved its worth. On its very first day of operation on the Shanghai Metro, in January, the system identified a wanted man when he entered a station. After matching his face against the database, Dragonfly Eye sent his photo to a policeman, who made an arrest.

That would mean combining the stream of data from glucose monitoring, insulin measurements, patient activity and meals, and applying machine learning to derive insights so the software can send alerts and recommendations back to patients and their doctors, she said. "But where we are in our maturity as an industry is just publishing numbers," "So we're just telling people what their glucose number is, which is critical for a type 1 diabetic. But a type 2 diabetic needs to engage with an app, and be compelled to interact with the insights. The ultimate goal, perhaps, would be to develop a user interface that uses the insights gained from machine learning to actually prompt diabetic patients to change their behavior. This point was echoed by Jean Balgrosky, an investor who spent 20 years as the CIO of large, complex healthcare organizations such as San Diego's Scripps Health.