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Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin

bostonreview.net

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Re: Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin

#4
post #3

Can’t they just be wrong , do they need to be biased? Has the english language run out of words except the ones ending in -ist?

While I get being touchy about such a term, I think bias is the proper term here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_(statistics)

Re: Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin

#5
post #3

Can’t they just be wrong , do they need to be biased? Has the english language run out of words except the ones ending in -ist?

Bias here means reliably off in a particular direction, not discriminatory.

“That statistical estimator has a bias” means that you can expect it to often produce an over estimate (for example).

Re: Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin

#6
If I understand it, they looked at 3 pulse ox meters. The expensive one from the company that was sponsoring the study read about one point (out of 100) lower on blacks which is inaccurate but not outrageous.

One of the off-brand meters was completely wrong (e.g. dangerous) for blacks, the other one was in between.

Re: Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin

#9

I wonder if the pulse oxes in China are calibrated for Chinese skin or White skin? Many people are buying pulse oxes straight off of Alibaba and they might be getting readings that are too low if the calibration is off.

I’ll be surprised if they are calibrated at all.

Re: Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin

#10
post #2

Quelle surprise - garbage in, garbage out. I'll bet my Apple Watch doesn't have these issues.

>I'll bet my Apple Watch doesn't have these issues.

I bet they do. They certainly did a while back, and I've found nothing saying this has been fixed.

https://bossip.com/1137485/race-matters-new-apple-watch-malf...

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