Oximeters Used to Be Designed for Equity. What Happened?

"...This technological loss could also be told as a story about shifting historical and societal norms over time. Hewlett-Packard's 1970s model included a transparent discussion of equitable design—but this also took place against the backdrop of the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights movement, when issues of racial equity were being more publicly discussed across sectors. Meanwhile, the later pulse ox models (the first in the US was patented by Biox in 1980) became one more face of the corporate enclosures of the era. When they first came to market, Kryger recalls, he tried to ask the engineers about calibration data, as was once considered standard safety practice. But they would no longer share it. “They were black boxes hidden with proprietary algorithms,” Kryger says. “The engineers at the time would not give any technical information such as accuracy in people with dark skin pigment.” (Wired, 4 June 21)

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