4 ms·
I'd hardly call it injustice. Anything based on light is going to be variable depending on skin tone (or, as other have mentioned, darkened skin for any reason)
by Teknoman117 6y ago
I'd hardly call it injustice. Anything based on light is going to be variable depending on skin tone (or, as other have mentioned, darkened skin for any reason).
The only thing you could claim injustice for would be if there was no other mechanism for measuring blood oxygen other than something that was known to not work properly for people of color.
- zamfi 6y agoA lot of other folks made this point, but I’m replying here because your response was the most considered. No one — myself including — is saying that physics is biased, or that this tool is inherently biased. The headline is misleading, it’s really talking about the interpretation of the number that’s biased, not the physics. The number is just a number. The bias comes through the typical institutional use of this tool, as described in the article: the “normal” regions are based on “normal” for lightly pigmented people, so heavily pigmented people are by default not in the “normal” range. Do some doctors realize this? Of course they do. But as programmers we all know the power of defaults some doctors won’t realize this, or will forget, or will realize it but it will still affect them. Other policies (like the Medicaid one described in the article) also ignore these differences. It’s not the physics that’s biased. It’s the institutional and individual assumptions around the tool.