A recent commentary in Nature Electronics by Sara Gerke and collaborators urge the community to look at these ethical and legal issues associated with IESs. An ingestible electronic sensor can be as small - and as easy to swallow - as a pill.

Speaking to the Guardian, the anonymous Apple contractor explained that their role is to “grade” the quality of Siri responses and check whether the voice assistant’s activation was accidental or not.

The class action lawsuit, filed by Matt Dinerstein in the Northern District of Illinois on Wednesday, claims that UChicago violated federal law protecting patient privacy in its partnership with Google to share records of patients from 2009 to 2016.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in US District Court for Northern Illinois, accuses the hospital of sharing hundreds of thousands of patient records with the tech giant without removing date stamps and doctor's notes. "The University of Chicago Medical Center has complied with the laws and regulations applicable to patient privacy," a University of Chicago spokesman said.

A unique patient identifier would allow federal bureaucrats and government-favored special interests to access health information simply by entering an individual’s unique patient ID into a database.

“There’s little doubt that new technologies will play a part in delivering care in future, and the results from this study confirm that most people support the use of anonymised patient data for medical research purposes,” said Rachel Power, chief executive of the Patients Association.

To work well, facial recognition systems need images with well-illuminated, clear faces that give a neural network detailed, accurate data. Royal Caribbean Cruises has twice as many passengers as Northwell has patients, and more of them, too, will see facial recognition as the program expands, project leader Schneider said.

Though it’s still unclear whether this will give Google access to patient records (DeepMind has made deals with Britain’s National Health Service in order to help doctors monitor kidney patients), what is clear is that Google has major healthcare aspirations.

Google looks increasingly at risk of breaking its pledge to keep DeepMind independent from the rest of the business, as a Telegraph investigation finds almost a fifth of the artificial intelligence arm’s staff have been moved in from other Google divisions.

Google has been accused of breaking promises to patients, after the company announced it would be moving a healthcare-focused subsidiary, DeepMind Health, into the main arm of the organisation. Google says the restructure is necessary to allow DeepMind’s flagship health app, Streams, to scale up globally.