India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has fully embraced the herculean challenge of digitising the world’s second most populous country.

Machine learning (ML) may well be The Next Big Thing™, but it has yet to register in mainstream enterprise adoption. While breathless prognosticators proclaim 50 per cent of organisations lining up to magically transform themselves in 2017 with ML, more canny observers put the number closer to 15 per cent. And that’s being generous.

On Thursday, researchers at Stanford University introduced the latest thing in AI diagnostics: an algorithm that can sift through hours of heart rhythm data gathered by wearable monitors to determine whether a patient has an irregular heartbeat, or arrhythmia.