The future of AI innovation starts with synthetic data and an industrial-grade open source SDK - Related to contract, ai, most, data, your

Adobe’s new AI assistant will finally demystify your phone contract

The corporation in the recent past conducted a “survey” of Acrobat individuals that found nearly 70% of consumers and more than 60% of small and medium business owners have, at some point, signed contracts without knowing or understanding all of the stipulated terms. “Contracts AI makes agreements easier to understand and compare and citations help consumers verify responses, all while keeping their data safe,” Abhigyan Modi, SVP of Adobe Document Cloud, noted in a press release.

Per Adobe, Acrobat’s AI capabilities “are governed by data security protocols and developed in alignment with Adobe’s AI Ethics processes.” As such, the organization does not train its generative models using its customer data and bans third-party developers from using Adobe data on models of their own. The new Contracts feature is available as a $5 per month add-on subscription through either the free Reader app or the paid Acrobat app. It’s currently only accessible on the desktop and web in English. The organization is working to expand the AI’s language options but has not specified a timeline for that yet.

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Heart disease kills the most Americans every year — smartwatches might save us

Table of Contents Table of Contents How can smartwatches assist? Fixing sedentary behavior Sleep, obesity, and nutrition What experts say.

The American Heart Association just released its 2025 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics upgrade findings with some critically critical stats. It mentions that heart-related diseases, which are on an upward trajectory across the globe, are the leading cause of death in the [website].

The findings, which have been , note that thousands of people die of cardiovascular disease in the country each day. The toll is so high that heart-related deaths account for more than the combined number of cancer-related and road accident casualties.

The analysis also highlights the rise in related kidney disease cases, both in the [website] and worldwide. Here are some other stats with links to the heart woes of Americans, as detailed in the 620-page analysis:

High blood pressure affects nearly 47% of [website] adults. Nearly 42% of [website] adults are obese, and more than 72% fall into the unhealthy weight class. For children, those numbers stand at 40% and 20%, respectively. Roughly 57% of American adults are living with Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes.

So, how exactly can the best smartwatches play a role in such a grim situation?

“They can play a complementary role as tools that encourage and help track healthy habits such as physical activity, heart rate during activity, and sleep habits in several ways: to the extent such tools are actively and accurately providing ‘health insights’ as part of the data collection/dashboarding, patients/individuals can become more aware of their health/body and the things that drive the outputs from these wearables,” Eduardo Sanchez, [website], FAHA, Chief Medical Officer for Prevention for the American Heart Association, tells Digital Trends.

Notably, at multiple points in the comprehensive research, experts mention the role and impact of wearable devices in alleviating the burden of cardiovascular health (CVH) and related deaths. For example, as part of the AHA’s updated Metrics for Measurement and Quantitative Assessment of CVH, doctors suggest using sleep data provided by wearable devices.

A majority of smartwatches — and even smart rings out there — can provide a detailed breakdown of an individual’s sleep habits. For example, the Apple Watch can offer a breakdown of REM, Core, and Deep sleep stages. And so can the latest watches from Samsung and Google.

The Apple smartwatch, for example, also exhibits a sleep history and ties it with corresponding heart rate and respiratory rate data. You can find technical details about Apple’s methodology here. Next, we have sleep apnea, which affects hundreds of millions across the world and ties into the pattern of poor sleep affecting cardiac health.

Samsung’s smartwatches have already received clearance for sleep apnea detection, and Apple is rumored to serve that feature soon. A dangerous condition on its own, the latest research also cites diverse research linking sleep apnea with serious blood pressure and cardiovascular problems, such as Atrial Fibrillation.

Notably, the smartwatch players have made brisk progress in the aforementioned niches, as well. Apple was the first to bring an AFib warning facility to mainstream smartwatches. Samsung and Fitbit have also received regulatory nodes for offering AFib detection on their respective smartwatches.

“For the masses, who lack proper knowledge of cardiac and respiratory issues, I would still recommend commercially available devices such as the Apple Watch,” says Dr. Ahmad Ghayas Ansari, DM (Cardiology) at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology.

“A good thing about this approach is that all the data is recorded and you can directly share it with your treating physician or consulting doctor. It saves crucial time and opens record-keeping avenues for future reuse,” he adds, citing his own experience with using a mass-market ECG device to keep an eye on his mother’s heart health.

A sedentary lifestyle is an open invitation to ailments, heart illnesses being just one among them. The latest AHA analysis, citing a meta-analysis of over a dozen peer-reviewed research papers, mentions that a sedentary way of life is “associated with an increased risk of fatal cardiovascular diseases.”.

One study from Taiwan, which had nearly half a million participants, pointed out that clients who spend more time sitting at a desk had a 34% higher chance of contracting cardiovascular diseases.

Conversely, over two dozen studies have cleared that increasing the intensity of physical activities can significantly improve cardiovascular health, lower the risk of vascular cognitive impairment, and deliver cardiometabolic health benefits.

Citing the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey’s data, the research says if adults over the age of 40 years increased their moderate to intense-level physical activity by merely 10 minutes per day, roughly 110,000 deaths could be averted annually.

Smartwatches and other mass-market wearables can help us change physical activity patterns in ways more than. For starters, one should follow the Stand Reminders on the Apple Watch, which periodically reminds individuals to stand up if it detects them sitting for the superior part of an hour.

Similar inactivity reminders can also be enabled on Samsung’s Galaxy and Google’s Pixel smartwatches. Third-party apps are also available for watchOS and Wear OS devices. Of course, if you’re engaged in a more active lifestyle, a majority of smartwatches out there offer activity recognition for a wide range of workouts.

Research conducted across the US, Europe, and Asia has given clear signs that poor or inadequate sleep increases the risks of cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, restful sleep was associated with a lowered risk of myocardial infarction.

As per a study conducted in the UK, even a single point improvement in the sleep score was linked with lowered chances of heart failure. Sleep apnea also appeared in the research work conducted over the past couple of decades, especially its ties with hypertension, recurrent myocardial infarction, and hospitalization due to heart failure.

Sleep often goes unreported as a less serious problem, but as per 2018 estimates, healthcare costs owing to sleep disorders alone accounted for roughly $94 billion in direct healthcare costs.

Dr. Arif Waqar, a resident doctor with expertise in heart health, tells Digital Trends that if a patient can share detailed data about their sleep history and heart activity, we can easily spot the irregularities and get a more effective understanding of their health situation.

“It’s a matter of awareness. If you have all that valuable data, leverage it,” he adds. Indeed, smartwatches can deliver a valuable bank of information that can help medical professionals make more informed decisions.

Obesity, nutrition, and blood pressure are some of the other crucial factors that are tied to heart health. Save for a few exceptions like the Huawei Watch D and the Samsung Galaxy Watch, most smartwatches can’t do much for the aforesaid woes.

They, however, offer companion apps and dashboards where individuals can log their food and medicine intake, as they move forward with a healthy food intake route. For example, one can use the Apple Medications app to keep track of their medicine intake progress.

What is crucial, however, is sharing the data with a medical expert, a mistake that a majority of smartwatch clients appear to be making. “If patients are monitoring their blood pressure at home and notice it’s been going up over time, they may want to discuss it with their doctor sooner rather than waiting for their annual visit,” explains Dr. Laxmi Mehta, an expert in heart diseases.

“Or they may capture some irregular heart rhythms on their devices, like atrial fibrillation, much sooner than would be diagnosed at the doctor’s office,” adds Dr. Mehta, who currently serves as the Director of Preventative Cardiology and Women’s Cardiovascular Health at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center.

Dr.Sanchez also shared similar sentiments. “We can trust these devices at this time to help physicians and other clinical team members to nudge their patients to take an interest in adopting healthier habits and use the devices to track their activity, he tells Digital Trends.

Heart health issues are on a worrisome upward trajectory, but timely intervention and a vigilant eye using the wearables at our disposal can yield positive results in the long run. At least medical experts are positive about the innovations and their impact.

Of course, there is always the standard line of caution, especially when it comes to putting too much trust in these wearables. “These devices allow such data points to be readily shared with healthcare professionals, that may complement traditional in-office/clinical data. The goal is for the wearable to compliment, not replace, the information that patient is receiving from their healthcare professional,” warns Dr. Sanchez from the American Heart Association.

“More diagnostic and disease management use of these devices is promising and but must be rigorously tested for safety and effectiveness. We need to be able to trust that the devices not only provide accurate data, but also that they provide timely, actionable feedback to the individual in a manner that they will understand,” he adds.

An Apple Watch saved my colleague’s life following a heart attack in the prime of his youth. A smartwatch just might save yours, next!

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The future of AI innovation starts with synthetic data and an industrial-grade open source SDK

Alexandra Ebert has possibly the coolest job title ever: Chief AI and Data Democratization Officer at MOSTLY AI.

Following her master's, she began working at MOSTLY (founded in 2017), a synthetic data firm that allows organisations to create fully anonymous datasets that retain the statistical properties of original data.

Its privacy-preserving synthetic data platform mimics real data without exposing sensitive information, with high-fidelity outputs that are recognised as some of the most accurate in the market, making them suitable for advanced AI and machine learning applications.

MOSTLY's platform enables organisations to safely unlock access to their sensitive data assets and realise the full potential of this data to drive AI innovations and, in doing so, address the problems with historical data anonymisation.

The firm in the recent past launched the first industry-grade open-source synthetic data toolkit (SDK), enabling any organisation to easily generate high-quality, privacy-safe synthetic datasets from sensitive proprietary data, all within their own compute infrastructure.

But before we dig into what it offers, let's explore why it's needed.

The problem with data anonymisation tech.

For example, a bank with a customer data table might redact sensitive details like last names and social security numbers using a black marker.

Even transaction details could be altered — your coffee at Starbucks might no longer be listed as $7 but instead as an estimated range of 5 to 10 euros or pounds.

"The goal was to obscure data until it seemed sufficiently anonymised. However, research has repeatedly demonstrated that such methods are ineffective in the era of big data. Today, large enterprises typically hold hundreds, if not thousands or even tens of thousands, of data points per customer. For instance, with credit card transactions, knowing just the merchant and the date of three separate transactions is often enough to re-identify 80 per cent of consumers."

, the other problem is that "AI thrives on data. If an organisation originally had 10,000 data points per customer but was reduced to just three or five due to anonymisation, the overall value of the dataset would diminish significantly.

This creates a dilemma: businesses need high-quality data for insights and innovation, but traditional privacy protection methods compromise its usefulness."

Unlike conventional techniques that modify, mask, or remove information from an existing dataset, MOSTLY's synthetic data platform leverages generative AI to analyse and understand the data's structure, patterns, and relationships.

"Put simply, an AI model can learn how end-consumers of a particular bank, telecom provider, or health insurer behave over time—capturing trends, dependencies, and correlations. For example, it can determine whether a customer who visits Starbucks in the morning will likely dine out for lunch or make a purchase on Amazon later in the day. These behavioural patterns can be automatically detected and replicated, preserving the statistical integrity of the data while ensuring privacy."

MOSTLY AI's tech incorporates a comprehensive set of privacy mechanisms to ensure that no personal secrets are learned or retained. The AI extracts generalisable patterns at a highly granular level while preventing the inclusion of uniquely identifiable individuals.

"For instance, if the dataset included a highly distinctive individual—like Bill Gates — he would be excluded to prevent a privacy violation, especially in regions with fewer billionaires, such as Austria, compared to the United States. Similarly, if there were only five individuals with an extremely rare disease, they would also be removed to safeguard their privacy. However, when characteristics appear in larger groups—say 20, 30, or 50 individuals—those patterns can be retained while still ensuring privacy protection."

Rigorous privacy mechanisms to filter out uniquely identifiable individuals,.

A completely separate generative process that creates synthetic data from scratch—without modifying or shuffling the original dataset.

This ensures both privacy protection and the preservation of valuable statistical insights.

MOSTLY works with Fortune 100 businesses across Europe, North America, and Asia and has raised $31 million since its launch. people include CitiBank, the US Department of Homeland Security, Erste Group, Telefonica, and two of the five largest US banks.

A world-first open source toolkit for creating privacy-safe synthetic data.

As part of MOSTLY's tool kit, synthetic data SDK is available as a standalone Python package at [website] under the fully permissive Apache v2 licence. What's more, it's easy to use.

"We ensure that our technology is super simple to operate because back in the day, with legacy anonymisation, you needed to be an expert. With Mostly AI, you don't need to decide how to protect privacy. The mechanisms activate automatically for any given data set that you put in to ensure complete anonymity."

However, , while organisations strive for widespread data use in AI and innovation, data remains siloed and inaccessible to most employees, with gatekeepers lacking the motivation to share.

Today, the shift is toward enterprise-wide data democratisation, enabling every employee to leverage AI effectively, with executives aiming to augment technical teams and marketing, sales, and other business units.

, open source plays a crucial role in MOSTLY's mission to democratise data:

"It was always our mission to democratise data, and we believe that this is such an critical resource that we need to open up data access not only within businesses but also society at large."

Mostly works with "ginormous" Fortune 100 companies, and using open source tech makes it much easier for end-consumers to deploy it in any environment, test it out, and then organically grow within an organisation.

"We can talk about AI saving the world, curing cancer, and helping tackle the climate crisis all day. If you're not going to open up data to the general public, NGOs, and researchers, the aspiration will not become a reality. If data is hoarded within the big corporates, the big techs, they always have for-profit motives, and we will not really use AI for societal progress. For example, we also want to integrate more tightly with leading cloud providers and open source helps there."

How synthetic data can fuel startup innovation and enterprise collaboration.

, being an AI ethicist at heart means ensuring responsible AI practices — transparency, fairness, and privacy — are built into inventions from the start, not treated as an afterthought.

She notes that many startups developing products for enterprises lack their own datasets, and "traditional methods can take months to produce incomplete and insecure "Swiss cheese" anonymised datasets."

"Traditional anonymisation methods take months and still result in incomplete, low-value datasets that may not be fully secure. Synthetic data reduces this process to just one or two business days, allowing companies to quickly and safely share data."

She advises startups should proactively request synthetic data:

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