When it comes to darker skin, pulse oximeters fall short

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