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Technology can be biased, and its design can disadvantage certain demographic groups. While efforts to address bias and promote fairness in technologies are rapidly growing in a variety of technical disciplines, Achuta Kadambi argues that similar growth is not occurring fast enough for medical engineering. Although computer science companies terminate lucrative but biased facial recognition systems, biased medical devices continue to be sold as commercial products, writes Kadambi in a Perspective. Bias in medical devices results in undesirable performance variation across demographic groups and can greatly influence health inequality. For example, optical biosensors that use light to monitor vital signs like blood oxygenation have been shown to work differently on light versus dark skin. Since some of these measures relate to what could be serious medical prognoses, such a biased medical device could lead to disparate mortality outcomes for Black and dark-skinned patients
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