Meet One Engineer Fixing A Racially Biased Medical Device

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2023

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

During the COVID-19 pandemic, one measurement became more important than almost any other: blood oxygen saturation. It was the one concrete number that doctors could use to judge how severe a case of COVID-19 was and know whether to admit people into the hospital and provide them with supplemental oxygen. But pulse oximeters, the device most commonly used to measure blood oxygen levels, don't work as well for patients of color. Kimani Toussaint, a physicist at Brown University, is leading a group trying to make a better, more equitable alternative a reality.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:05.5	It was 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when Kimani Tussant first heard about
0:12.5	the problems with pulse oximeters.
0:15.3	We're all watching the news and finding out what was going on with this before any vaccines.
0:19.6	Sick patients were showing up at the hospital with dangerously low blood oxygen saturation
0:24.8	levels.
0:25.8	Healthcare workers were relying more and more on a device called a pulse oximeter to monitor
0:30.8	their condition and to determine how much extra oxygen to give them.
0:34.9	But doctors at the University of Michigan Hospital noticed something was wrong.
0:39.4	The device, which uses light to shine through a fingertip, wasn't recognizing low oxygen
0:44.2	levels in patients with darker skin tones.
0:47.2	The Michigan doctors published their study in the New England Journal of Medicine in December
0:51.2	2020, and it sent shockwaves through the medical world.
0:55.4	From Kimani, who is a professor in the School of Engineering at Brown University, heard
1:00.0	about it from his wife, Diana Grigsby Tussant, an epidemiologist at Brown.
1:04.7	She actually knew before the Michigan study about the concerns with pulse oximeters.
1:08.7	I said to him, you know, it's highly relevant.
1:11.3	You're an engineer and this is something you should go and look into in terms of why this
1:16.1	is the case.
1:17.2	What was fascinating and surprising and disturbing was that this problem had been documented
1:24.2	much earlier than the pandemic, the COVID pandemic.
1:29.7	But even myself, I'm being an optics.
	...

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