| Improving artificial intelligence to help prevent heart attacks doesn’t just depend on innovation. It also hinges on creating standards, the wonky underpinnings of the technology agreed to by companies and government agencies. For example, the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas, recently created an A.I. working group made up of gadget makers and healthcare organizations. The goal is to establish best practices for how health-related devices collect, process, and exchange people's personal data. It’s not sexy stuff. But standards are critical to making A.I. more useful in nearly every industry. General Motors, Ford, and Toyota, for instance, recently founded a group to establish standards related to self-driving cars. Meanwhile, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, representing industries like telecommunications and electrical engineering, recently formed an umbrella organization for groups working on A.I.-related issues like bias in algorithms, data collection, and autonomous robots. It’s all a product of A.I.’s relative youth. The technology has emerged so quickly that, in most cases, there is still no consensus within individual industries about how to gather or even interpret data. Consider fitness trackers that collects heart-rate data and then, potentially, alert doctors when a patient is about to go into cardiac arrest. A lack of agreement about how to precisely measure heart rates could keep the technology from living up to its promise. Michael Hodgkins, chief medical information officer the American Medical Association, a member of the Consumer Technology Association’s A.I. health group, points to the widespread problem of clunky software in medicine and how it contributes to the high rate of job burnout by healthcare professionals. It’s such a sore spot that The New Yorker recently wrote about the challenge. "We've seen too much technology becoming burdensome," Hodgkins said recently at a press event. The Consumer Technology Association’s A.I. healthcare group is also partly intended to convince the federal government to limit regulation of A.I. The association’s CEO, Gary Shapiro, argues that too much regulation may slow innovation. Of course, getting everyone, including rivals, to cooperate on standards is easier said than done. The A.I. health group’s members include Google, IBM, Samsung, and Fitbit. Noticeably absent? Apple, which is making a big push in healthcare with its Apple Watch. Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com | 
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