![]() ![]() There’s always lot of scatter directly off the skin, which is one of the reasons why we typically put pulse oximeters on the nail bed.Click to expand. “Most probes that do surface oximetry, instead of shining through a fingertip, have bigger sensors and emitters than the Apple Watch. “It can have a lot to do with the quality and intensity of the LED,” Dr. Feiner says installing more powerful LED lights in Apple’s built-in pulse oximetry device may give the smartwatch the boost it needs to pass through dark colors with ease-and give more accurate readings, in general. But rest assured, tattooed and tan folk, alike-if indeed the Apple Watch heart monitor doesn’twork on your skin, there are potential solutions. Jason markx skin#So it is scientifically possible-but utterly unclear-that tattoos and dark skin interfere with pulse oximetry (and Apple Watch) readings. There aren’t any studies exploring this subject, perhaps because most people don’t get tattoos on their fingertips, where pulse oximeters are traditionally worn. We still don’t know how dark skin (or tattoos) might interfere with the Apple Watch’s traditionally less sensitive surface probes.Īs for permanent tattoos, the jury is still out. Feiner reported a correlation between dark skin and pulse oximetry errors. But both of these studies focused on pulse oximeters that shine light directly through fingernails. But black henna (which, like dark nail polish, absorbs most of the visible light in the spectrum) has not yet been studied. A 2014 paper in the British Medical Journal found that traditional red henna tattoos did not interfere with pulse oximetry readings. Low oxygen levels (and nail polish) both block the light, resulting in lower readings.Ĭomment from discussion Anyone with tattoos and the watch please read.īut whether darker skin and tattoos have the same negative effect is wholly unclear. Pulse oximeters work by shining two very specific wavelengths of red and infrared light into your bloodstream, and recording how much of that light passes through. And that last bit-nail polish-may explain what’s going on with Apple’s smartwatch. Bright light, shivering, low body temperature and nail polish can all interfere with pulse oximetry readings. For the smartwatch, Apple engineers worked backward: They installed a pulse oximeter with heart rate monitoring capabilities, and then disabled the pulse oximeter function so the smartwatch would only display a heart rate.īut pulse oximeters are notoriously annoying bits of medical technology. Pulse oximeters often double as heart rate monitors because each time your heart beats, your blood oxygen levels rise slightly, and newer models can count those tiny jumps in oxygen to calculate heart rate (or “pulsatile component”). First of all, the Apple Watch heart rate monitor is essentially a juiced-up pulse oximeter (at the hospital, that’s the plastic clip that nurses snap onto your finger tip to read your blood oxygen levels). ![]() My #AppleWatch will be here anytime today. Certainly, skin coloration could have a pretty big effect.” And my guess is that tattoos, depending on their color, could reflect some of the light so that it doesn’t pass through the tissue. “Melanin does absorb the infrared and red light that pulse oximetry uses. John Feiner, a pulse oximetry researcher at Hypoxia Lab and professor at the University of California San Francisco. Verge advises, at the very least, that Apple fans reconsider getting sleeve tattoos.īut, scientifically speaking, could tattoos and dark skin really foil the Apple Watch? Fusion speculated that the Apple Watch might malfunction on a black person’s wrist, too (and called out Apple’s light-skinned top execs for neglecting black customers), #TattooGate has already garnered hundreds of retweets, and the tongue-in-cheek #BlackWristsMatter is currently making rounds online. It didn’t take long for this relatively minor bug to spiral out of control. After a few frustrated early adopters took to Reddit Tuesday to hash out the particulars, it now appears that some black and red tattoos interfere with the built-in heart rate monitor in Apple’s new smartwatch. If you have a dark tattoo on your wrist, the new Apple Watch may not work as expected. The Apple Watch snafu isn’t the first time researchers have questioned how pigments affect pulse oximeters. ![]()
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