When it comes to darker skin, pulse oximeters fall short

[Jilly_in_VA]

Over the past two years, the pulse oximeter has become a crucial tool for tracking the health of COVID-19 patients.

The small device clips onto a finger and measures the amount of oxygen in a patient's blood. But a growing body of evidence shows the device can be inaccurate when measuring oxygen levels in people with dark skin tones.

A study published on Monday only adds to this concern.

Researchers analyzing pre-pandemic health data also find those measurements resulted in patients of color receiving less supplemental oxygen than white patients did.

"We were fooled by the pulse oximeter," says the study's lead author Dr. Leo Anthony Celi, who's clinical research director and principal research scientist at the MIT Laboratory of Computational Physiology.

"We were given the false impression that the patients were okay. And what we showed in this study is that we were giving them less oxygen than they needed," he says.

These sobering findings are bringing more urgency to educating patients and medical professionals about the shortcomings of the pulse oximeter — and to designing new models that can work reliably regardless of someone's skin color.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/11/1110370384/when-it-comes-to-darker-skin-pulse-oximeters-fall-short

[Diamond_Dog]

1. I did not know this.

Makes you wonder how many other medical devices may be inaccurate in regards to people of color. TY for posting.

[tulipsandroses]

6. Ever heard of the racist soap dispenser or the racist faucets

in public bathrooms?
Videos showing how they work differently for darker skin went viral a few years ago. Same thing with facial recognition on cell phones and fitbits.
May seem insignificant until you realize the same people cursing at the racist faucets, may have adverse outcomes because of the same reason the faucet or soap dispenser does not work.

[MontanaMama]

2. Whoa. I had no clue.

We've got a ways to go in this country in terms of medical testing. A pulse oximeter is a basic tool and we should be able to use them on everyone. There are major inequities in medical research as well for POC and women in general. We're not all white males...about damned time medical research caught up with this fact.

[Jilly_in_VA]

3. I remember when pulse oximetry first came in

I was still a pretty new nurse and we could only use them in ICU at the time (which was where I worked). If someone out on the floor needed to check their patient they had to call us to come out there. We thought it was a marvel back then. Amazing how many things that were new then are now routine and/or needing replacement....

[CentralMass]

4. There is a Brown University student has a working solution for thst

https://www.brown.edu/news/2022-04-07/pulseox
The device uses radially polarized light.

[hlthe2b]

5. Definitely so. But made even worse by very long fingernails, fake nails, and extreme manicures.

Sometimes the latter can be worked around, but dark skin tone is a major problem.