Can technology be blind to skin color?

According to research, it can. And it’s become a pervasive problem that shows up in artificial intelligence, medical devices, and even public bathrooms.

Harvard University sociology professor Dr. Ellis Monk is an expert on health disparities, ethno-racial inequality, and skin tone. He said a lot of social scientists like himself study inequality because there are so many things that people can’t control, such as their skin tone, race, gender, and even socioeconomic class. Those aspects can play a role in how technology interacts with you.

“There is a whole wide world out there of technologies where your skin is really important,” he said.

One example of this problem is sometimes experienced by people of color in public bathrooms, he said. They’ll put their hands under a faucet, but the water doesn’t turn on because the sensors on the faucet don’t identify them.

Studies also show that self-driving cars can have difficulty detecting pedestrians with darker skin and don’t recognize them as people who should be avoided on the road.

Both scenarios — the faucets and self-driving vehicles — are examples of algorithms that are used to detect humans not being adequately tested against a wide enough variety of skin tones, Monk said.

The bias also appears in medical devices, such as pulse oximeters, or bilirubin detectors, where light absorption and melanin could impact the quality of a signal back to the device.

He calls it color-blind technology and its shortcomings, particularly in medicine, inspired him to develop a new skin tone scale that would be both easy to use and representative of skin tones around the world.

A new standard

In 1975, the Fitzpatrick scale was developed by a dermatologist to measure people’s sunburn and skin cancer risks. It was never intended to measure skin tone. However, it’s been adopted widely despite its “profound limitations,” such as not including enough light- or dark-skinned options, Monk said.

Monk’s scale, appropriately named the Monk Skin Tone Scale, sets a benchmark for 10 light, medium, and dark skin tones. It not only includes a wider spectrum of skin tones, but more variation within the scale, too.

The Monk Skin Tone Scale

Major tech companies – and Medtronic – now use the Monk Skin Tone Scale to create more inclusive artificial intelligence and ensure clinical trials of medical devices are more inclusive. Monk did not anticipate its widespread adoption when he began his research, but said it will help advance health equity around the world.

“This is something that lots of different companies need to make sure that their products work equally well across the entire skin tone continuum,” Monk said of the scale, which is open-sourced and open-licensed so it can be widely used.

The speed at which some companies embrace the evidence around skin tone and make changes to how they do business gives Monk hope. Skin tone should “have no bearing on the kind of healthcare and the quality and access to that care that you receive,” he said.

Acute Care & Monitoring products should not be used as the sole basis for diagnosis or therapy and are intended only as an adjunct in patient assessment.

L001-10222024

 

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