Category: 3. Business

Expert judges determining the best of the best in healthcare innovation recognized OMRON Healthcare for its blood pressure monitors with AI-powered AFib detection

HOFFMAN ESTATES, Ill., Oct. 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Judges in the prestigious Digital Health Hub Foundation 2025 Digital Health Awards recognized OMRON Healthcare as the Best in Class Winner in the Home Health Diagnostics & Monitoring category for its breakthrough blood pressure monitors with AI-powered AFib detection.

The Digital Health Awards, which honor the best of the best in healthcare innovation, heralded OMRON’s evolution of the blood pressure monitoring experience. In a medical device first, OMRON blood pressure monitors featuring IntelliSense™ AFib detection automatically screen for atrial fibrillation during every blood pressure measurement and can provide early detection of elevated risk for a high stroke¹, heart failure², and dementia risk³.

“Our OMRON Healthcare team is thrilled to accept this Best in Class Digital Health Award,” said Alice Koehler, Managing Director of OMRON Healthcare North America. “The digital health category is rapidly maturing and there was a record-setting number of entrants in the competition this year. Thank you to the judges for recognizing our achievement in innovation that empowers people to take charge of their health.” 

“OMRON applied more than 50 years of collaboration with doctors and service to consumers to develop this breakthrough technology,” said Koehler. “The latest AHA and ACC blood pressure guidelines urge regular blood pressure monitoring at home and earlier intervention on hypertension, especially for those over age 40 and for expectant moms throughout pregnancy.”

“Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is widely undiagnosed. The health risks of AFib increase for those with high blood pressure and women in menopause. With OMRON IntelliSense™ AFib detection, we are helping people act on this condition earlier than ever before,” added Koehler.

OMRON blood pressure monitors with IntelliSense™ AFib detection include the OMRON Platinum BP5465, OMRON 10 Series® BP7465, , OMRON Gold BP5360, and OMRON 7 Series® BP7360. These clinically validated blood pressure monitors are listed on the U.S. Blood Pressure Validated Device Listing (VDL), and sync with the OMRON connect app which tracks user readings, analyzes trends and habits, presents insights to explain data, and provides daily reminders and progress reports.

OMRON’s IntelliSense™ AFib detection incorporates over 300 mathematical indices into a machine-learning algorithm that analyzes the pressure pulse wave generated as the blood pressure monitor cuff inflates. A study published in the October 2024 Heart Rhythm Journal⁴ found that OMRON blood pressure monitors with the Intellisense™ AFib algorithm can detect disturbances specific to AFib with remarkable accuracy.

The FDA granted OMRON medical device authorization for Intellisense™ AFib via the agency’s De Novo classification⁵, a regulatory pathway for first-of-their-kind innovations.⁶

The Digital Health Hub Foundation Awards spotlight the most innovative healthtech companies transforming healthcare through technology and recognizing the companies making the biggest impact. Each year, the competition attracts groundbreaking companies from around the world, with the most impactful advancing to the final stage.

The 7^th Annual Digital Health Awards announced the Best in Class and Rising Star winners across all categories during the Grand Finale at HLTH USA in Las Vegas on October 20, 2025. The awards were presented across multiple live stages and celebrated before an audience of global healthcare leaders, investors and innovators.

“This year’s winners represent the best of what digital health has to offer, innovation that is not only transformative, but practical, scalable, and ready to make an impact today. We are proud to celebrate these companies for their vision and commitment to improving healthcare,” said Mark H. Goldstein, Chairman of the Digital Health Hub Foundation.

About the Digital Health Hub Foundation
The Digital Health Hub Foundation’s mission is to support the world’s most innovative healthcare companies in scaling and growing. Since 2017, the organization’s 30,000-member community has been dedicated to fostering innovation, including early-to-late-stage healthcare companies, industry providers, payors, mentors, and investors. Through their annual awards, the Digital Health Hub Foundation brings together the healthcare industry to celebrate and validate the best of the best in health technology.

About OMRON Healthcare, Inc.
OMRON Healthcare, Inc., is the world’s leading manufacturer and distributor of personal heart health products and an innovator in technologies supporting respiratory and pain management care. With over 50 years of medical device category leadership, OMRON is passionate about empowering people to take charge of their health at home through precise technology. Its market-leading products include a full range of home blood pressure monitors, nebulizers and TENS devices. The company’s mission is Going for Zero, the elimination of heart attacks and strokes. With more than 400 million devices sold globally, OMRON provides the world’s most recommended blood pressure monitors by healthcare professionals. OMRON Healthcare strives to improve lives and contribute to a better society by developing innovations that help people prevent, treat, and manage their medical conditions. The company provides products and services in over 130 countries. For more information, visit OmronHealthcare.com.

¹ CDC AFib and Stroke https://www.cdc.gov/heart-disease/about/atrial-fibrillation.html?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/atrial_fibrillation.htm
² AFib and Heart Failure https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/atrial-fibrillation/afib-complications
³ PubMed: AFib and dementia https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10568548/
⁴ Heart Rhythm Journal, October 2024 https://www.heartrhythmjournal.com/article/S1547-5271(24)02520-7/fulltext
⁵ FDA De Novo https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/premarket-submissions-selecting-and-preparing-correct-submission/de-novo-classification-request
⁶ FDA De Novo AI First https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-authorizes-marketing-first-device-uses-artificial-intelligence-help-detect-potential-signs-colon

SOURCE OMRON Healthcare

Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position as a rival to Wikipedia.

Writing on social media, Musk said that Grokipedia.com is “now live” and its goal is the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Musk has previously criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and called for people to stop donating to the site, which is run by a nonprofit. In September he announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI was working on Grokipedia.

READ MORE: Why does the AI-powered chatbot Grok post false, offensive things on X?

The Grokipedia site has a minimalist appearance with little beyond a search bar where users can type in queries. It states that it has 885,279 articles. Wikipedia, meanwhile, says it has more than 7 million articles in English.

Like Wikipedia, users can search for articles on various topics such as Taylor Swift, the baseball World Series, or Buckingham Palace.

While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, it’s unclear how exactly Grokipedia articles are put together. Reports suggest the site is powered by the same xAI model that underpins Musk’s Grok chatbot, but some articles are seemingly adapted from Wikipedia.

As a huge trove of well-constructed sentences with little restriction on how it’s used, Wikipedia has been a key source used to train AI chatbots, including Grok’s rivals ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. That’s one reason Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress said they launched an investigation in August of alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.

READ MORE: Citing ‘disruptive’ edits, Wikipedia bars anonymous entries from Congress-linked computers

Wikipedia encourages its volunteer editors to cite nearly every sentence or paragraph with a primary source, and sentences not verified can be challenged and removed. Some of Grokipedia’s entries are thinly sourced, such as an entry on the Chola Dynasty of southern India that has three linked sources, compared to Wikipedia’s that has 113 linked sources plus dozens of referenced books.

Grokipedia’s entry on Wikipedia accuses the site of having “systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.”

The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

(Reuters) -Online travel agent Booking Holdings beat Wall Street estimates for third-quarter revenue and profit on Tuesday, helped by more customers bundling their reservations on its platform and steady travel demand.

Shares of the company rose nearly 5% in after-hours trading.

“While there remains some uncertainty in the macroeconomic and geopolitical backdrop, we are pleased to see continued momentum with steady travel demand trends in our business so far in the fourth quarter,” the company said in a statement.

Gross bookings for the third quarter came in at $49.7 billion, up 14% from last year.

The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company reported a quarterly adjusted profit of $99.50 per share, compared with analysts’ estimates of $95.66 per share, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Total revenue for the quarter ended September 30 was $9.01 billion, also above expectations of $8.72 billion.

(Reporting by Aishwarya Jain and Utkarsh Shetti in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)

Some of the most expensive drugs currently in use are gene therapies to treat specific diseases, and their high cost limits their availability for those who need them. Part of the reason for the cost is that the manufacturing process yields as much as 90 percent non-active material, and separating out these useless parts is slow, leads to significant losses, and is not well adapted to large-scale production. Separation accounts for almost 70 percent of the total gene therapy manufacturing cost. But now, researchers at MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Center for Biomedical Innovation have found a way to greatly improve that separation process.

The findings are described in the journal ACS Nano, in a paper by MIT Research Scientist Vivekananda Bal, Edward R. Gilliland Professor Richard Braatz, and five others.

“Since 2017, there have been around 10,000 clinical trials of gene therapy drugs,” Bal says. Of those, about 60 percent are based on adeno-associated virus, which is used as a carrier for the modified gene or genes. These viruses consist of a sort of shell structure, known as capsids, that protects the genetic material within, but the production systems used to manufacture these drugs tend to produce large quantities of empty capsids with no genetic material inside.

These empty capsids, which can make up anywhere from half to 90 percent of the yield, are useless therapeutically, and in fact can be counterproductive because they can add to any immune reaction in the patient without providing any benefit. They must be removed prior to the formulation as a part of the manufacturing process. The existing purification processes are not scalable and involve multiple stages, have long processing times, and incur high product losses and high cost. 

Separating full from empty capsids is complicated by the fact that in almost every way, they appear nearly identical. “They both have similar structure, the same protein sequences,” Bal says. “They also have similar molecular weight, and similar density.” Given the similarity, it’s extremely challenging to separate them. “How do you come up with a method?”

Most systems presently use a method based on chromatography, in which the mixture passes through a column of absorbent material, and slight differences in the properties can cause them to pass through at different rates, so that they can be separated out. Because the differences are so slight, the process requires multiple rounds of processing, in addition to filtration steps, adding to the time and cost. The method is also inefficient, wasting up to 30 or 40 percent of the product, Bal says. And the resulting product is still only about two-thirds pure, with a third of inactive material remaining.

There is another purification method that is widely used in the small molecule pharmaceutical industry, which uses a preferential crystallization process instead of chromatography, but this method had not been tried for protein purification — specifically, capsid-based drugs — before. Bal decided to try it, since with this method “its operating time is low and the product loss is also very low, and the purity achieved is very, very high because of the high selectivity,” he says. The method separates out empty from full capsids in the solution, as well as separating out cell debris and other useless material, all in one step, without requiring the significant pre-processing and post-processing steps needed by the other methods.

“The time required for purification using the crystallization method is around four hours, compared to that required for the chromatography method, which is about 37 to 40 hours,” he says. “So basically, it is about 10 times more effective in terms of operating time.” This novel method will reduce the cost of gene therapy drugs by five to 10 times, he says.

The method relies on a very slight difference in the electrical potential of the full versus empty capsids. DNA molecules have a slight negative charge, whereas the surface of the capsids has a positive charge. “Because of that, the overall charge density distribution of the full capsids will be different from that of the empty capsids,” he says. That difference leads to a difference in the crystallization rates, which can be used to create conditions that favor the crystallization of the full capsids while leaving the empty ones behind.

Tests proved the effectiveness of the method, which can be easily adapted to large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, he says. The team has applied for a patent through MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, and is already in discussions with a number of pharmaceutical companies about beginning trials of the system, which could lead to the system becoming commercialized within a couple of years, Bal says.

“They’re basically collaborating,” he says of the companies. “They’re transferring their samples for a trial with our method,” and ultimately the process will either be licensed to a company, or form the basis of a new startup company, he says.

In addition to Bal and Braatz, the research team also included Jacqueline Wolfrum, Paul Barone, Stacy Springs, Anthony Sinskey, and Robert Kotin, all of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation. The work was supported by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Sanofi S.A., Sartorius AG, Artemis Life Sciences, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

HOUSTON, Oct. 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Bristow Group Inc. (NYSE: VTOL), the global leader in innovative and sustainable vertical flight solutions, today announced it will release its third quarter 2025 financial results after market close on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. In connection with the release, Bristow has scheduled a conference call for Wednesday, November 5, 2025, to begin at 10:00 a.m. ET (9:00 a.m. CT).

Investors may participate in the call by using the following link, which is now open for early registration: https://www.veracast.com/webcasts/bristow/webcasts/VTOL3Q25.cfm.

A replay of the call will be available through November 25, 2025, and can be accessed using the same link. The accompanying investor presentation will be available on November 4, 2025, on the investor section of Bristow’s website at www.bristowgroup.com.

About Bristow Group

Bristow Group Inc. is the leading global provider of innovative and sustainable vertical flight solutions. Bristow primarily provides aviation services to a broad base of offshore energy companies and government entities. Our aviation services include personnel transportation, search and rescue (“SAR”), medevac, fixed-wing transportation, unmanned systems and ad hoc helicopter services. Our business is comprised of three operating segments: Offshore Energy Services, Government Services and Other Services. Our energy customers charter our helicopters primarily to transport personnel to, from and between onshore bases and offshore production platforms, drilling rigs and other installations. Our government customers primarily outsource SAR activities whereby we operate specialized helicopters and provide highly trained personnel. Our other services include fixed-wing transportation services through a regional airline in Australia and dry-leasing aircraft to third-party operators in support of other industries and geographic markets.

Bristow currently has customers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, the Dutch Caribbean, the Falkland Islands, Ireland, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Spain, Suriname, Trinidad, the United Kingdom (“UK”) and the United States (“U.S.”). To learn more, visit our website at www.bristowgroup.com.

Investors
Bristow Group Inc.
Jennifer Whalen
+1 713.369.4636
InvestorRelations@bristowgroup.com

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SOURCE Bristow Group