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Scientific American
Designers should show how well instruments perform across different populations
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We don t think of everyday devices as biased against race or gender, but they can be. Electrical engineer and computer scientist Achuta Kadambi is familiar with the problem both professionally and personally. “Being fairly dark-skinned myself,” Kadambi says, he sometimes cannot activate no-touch soap dispensers and faucets that detect light bouncing off skin. At one airport, he recalls, “I had to ask a lighter-skinned traveler to trigger a faucet for me.”
Medical devices, too, can be biased an issue that has gained attention during the COVID pandemic, along with many other inequities that affect health. In a recent article in
Cindy Fan, Jayathi Murthy, Karen Umemoto, Roger Wakimoto and David Yoo expressed how the work to create a more equitable society has never been more important.