Go to any health-care facility, and one of many first issues they’ll do is clip a pulse oximeter to your finger. These gadgets, which observe coronary heart price and blood oxygen, provide important details about an individual’s well being.

However they’re additionally flawed. For folks with darkish pores and skin, pulse oximeters can overestimate simply how a lot oxygen their blood is carrying. That implies that an individual with dangerously low oxygen ranges might sound, in line with the heart beat oximeter, superb.

The US Meals and Drug Administration continues to be attempting to determine what to do about this drawback. Final week, an FDA advisory committee met to mull over higher methods to judge the efficiency of those gadgets in folks with quite a lot of pores and skin tones. However engineers have been occupied with this drawback too. Cassandra Willyard has dug into why they’re biased and what technological fixes is perhaps doable. Check out what she discovered.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and well being e-newsletter. Join to obtain it in your inbox each Thursday.

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