Scientists have long known that pulse oximeters are less accurate when used for people with dark skin tones – and now, a new report offers some insight into just how much more inaccurate these ...

-One of healthcare’s most fundamental tools works less reliably for people with darker skin tones. - An Oakland clinic’s lawsuit is helping to change that in California. The pulse oximeter, a device ...

For most people, a normal pulse oximeter reading is between 95% and 100%, with readings below 90-92% generally considered low and requiring medical attention. They are known to be affected by several ...

One of the first studies exploring the relationship between skin tone and oximeter accuracy was published in 2005 by Anesthesiology. The study concluded that of the three pulse oximeters tested on a ...

Tiffany Kinyua is a psychology major with a minor in biology and she is a 2025-26 health care ethics intern at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Views are her own.

In the EXAKT study from the U.K., the home-use pulse oximeters assessed all gave higher oxygen saturation (SpO2) readings for patients with darker skin tones than for patients with lighter skin tones.

Black people in the hospital are 31.9% more likely than White patients to have pulse oximeter readings that overestimate their oxygen levels by at least 4 percentage points, according to data ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A pulse oximeter on a patient's finger. (Christoph Soeder/Getty Images) The pulse oximeter, a device that measures the degree to ...