t’s entertaining to watch IBM’s Watson make mincemeat of its human counterparts on Jeopardy, but the computing techniques that helped the computer best humans at trivia could soon be saving lives in the ICU. Artemis, a software program built on the back of IBM analytics software similar to that powering Watson, is being tested as a means to provide early warnings when babies in the ICU acquire hospital-borne infections.

The ICU is naturally an environment fraught with problems, but one of the most fundamental is an information glut--patients there are surrounded by equipment churning out streams of data about each one, yet there’s no way to distill all this data to its relevant meaning in real time (usually it’s broken down into notes by a nurse once an hour).

Meanwhile, all that meaningful data on blood oxygen levels, respiratory rates, heart rates, electrocardiogram, temperature, etc. is basically ignored because there’s no way to monitor everything for patterns or trends that might hide an underlying indicator. That’s what Artemis does. Grabbing data from both medical records and those real time sensors feeding data to the machine, Artemis’ algorithms look for signals that an infection might be taking root.

This is where Artemis begins to compute like Watson. The two are different in several ways, but Artemis was built on an analytics platform called InfoSphere that came out of IBM research just as Watson did. And both make decisions on the fly based on rapidly incoming data from multiple sources, no archiving necessary.