The reckoning for racially biased pulse oximeters is coming due

Amid a national reckoning with racism spurred by the COVID-19 death rate among Black Americans, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s standards for pulse oximeters – those all-too-common devices that use light to measure oxygen saturation in the blood – “essentially ignored how skin tone can affect a pulse ox reading,” according to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School.

While…