Whenever you go to the doctor's office—be it your primary care physician or an urgent care clinic—there are a few things that always happen. They take your temperature and blood pressure, get your ...

Pulse oximeter devices routinely overestimate blood oxygen levels in darker-skinned patients—a racial bias that can trigger downstream health harms for Black individuals, compounding well beyond any ...

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 ...

For a healthy adult sitting at sea level, a pulse oximeter should read between 95 and 100 percent. That is the normal band clinicians use. Once the number slips below 90 percent, you have crossed the ...

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday proposed a long-awaited plan aimed at improving how pulse oximeters work on people with darker skin — an effort that comes years after research showing that ...

Blood oxygen measurements taken with pulse oximeters in hospitals tend to be lower than they really are, according to the Equiox study, which was designed to assess the technology’s measurement ...

In a suit filed against CVS, Walgreens, GE Healthcare and many other medical technology companies and sellers of pulse oximeters – devices that use light to measure oxygen saturation in the blood – ...

A prototype of the ChromaSense pulse oximeter, which can read accurate blood oxygen saturation levels regardless of skin tone, age, and other factors that often introduce errors in many devices used ...

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.