Companies get sued by random people for stuff like this all the time, I don't think there's anything here that indicates this is particularly newsworthy or exceptional. This is the same class-action lawyer who sued Kellogs for not putting enough strawberry ingredients into their strawberry poptarts: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/30/1050175655/strawberry-pop-tar.... Apparently (according to that NPR article) he files ~3 lawsuits per week
> This is the same class-action lawyer who sued Kellogs for not putting enough strawberry ingredients into their strawberry poptarts
I'm definitely against frivolous lawsuits, but that doesn't seem like a good example of one to me. "Product isn't what it claims" seems like a totally valid lawsuit.
Exactly. I have no problems with someone going after false or misleading advertising.
Does any brand make a decent toaster ready alternative that isn't just flavored sugar but actually contains a decent amount of actual strawberry filling?
I'll give Kellogg's some credit for having the other fruits listed in the ingredients and making it clear there is very little fruit at all. It looks like strawberry pop-tarts may contain more salt than strawberry.
ingredients on the box says:
wheat flour, sugar, sugar, sugar, oil, sugar, and wheat flour.
Contains 2% or less of wheat starch, salt, dried strawberries, dried pears, dried apples, baking soda/baking powder, citric acid, gelatin, more wheat starch, yellow corn flour, caramel color, xanthan gum, corn starch, turmeric extract color, soy lecithin, red 40, yellow 6, blue 1
There are slightly different rules for health devices than for leisure ones. If the problem is real, then it seems reasonable to me for Apple (and everyone else, just to be clear) to be made to amend their printed materials to properly disclose well-known-to-Apple problems with oximetry in darker skin. Again, if the problem is real, then they guy deserves a refund, fees covered, maybe a small token for the effort, and for Apple to not make product claims that it can't fulfill. I do hope it doesn't turn into a giant thing though.
> and for Apple to not make product claims that it can't fulfill.
What claim did they make? AFAIK, their page on the oximeter always had a disclaimer (the current one says “Blood Oxygen app measurements are not intended for medical use, including self-diagnosis or consultation with a doctor, and are only designed for general fitness and wellness purposes”)
I do read the ToS and I skim the EULA. I skim the ToS between OS releases (so maybe it's possible the latest point release acknowledges this.)
To be clear, I don't think it'd be acceptable for this to be hidden in the Terms either way.
And no, that's not really equivalent either. And the drawback becomes immediately evident to almost anyone taking photos, since they have their own eyes to compare to.
Why would they need to? It functions the same way all oximeters do, which have been around for decades.
My friend is heavily tattooed and their apple watch doesn't even know its on their wrist and they lost alot of functionality because of that. They would love for it to work but understand the limitations of the technology currently.
Apple already lists many limitations of their technology, and not everyone has the benefit of the knowledge of the limitations of each component of the devices. Many customers of the Watch have not even been around for decades plural.
We pay Apple to understand the internals they put in their watch, so they should be the ones to describe the limitations of their technology.
Companies marketing departments do not go around creating a list of issues with their products unless a government mandates they do so (rx meds, nicotine, liquor).
I am unaware of Apple listing limitations of any of their technologies. Could you provide a few examples?
Brightness, battery, cell support, limited water and dust resistance, etc. are the most obvious ones. The footnotes list other details, including demographics on which certain features are less effective.
For example,
> Irregular rhythm notification requires the latest version of watchOS and iOS. It is not intended for use by people under 22 years old or those who have been previously diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (AFib).
As someone else linked in the thread, it turns out Apple actually does claim their oximeter method is special and improves on conventional oximetry, accounting for the range of human skin tones: https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Blood_Oxygen_app_...
If their O2 meter functions poorly depending on skin tone, that's very obviously worth noting in a footer.
From a quick search it appears that subcutaneous fat can adversely affect the accuracy of an optical pulse oximeter. It sounds like everyone with a large BMI should get a class action going too.
For that matter, I can't believe that the GPS in the Apple Watch, which is marketed as accurate by a trillion dollar company, works worse for people living in dense urban areas. Another clear case of bias against the urban poor while billionaires living on their ranches in Montana with an open view of the sky enjoy perfect GPS.
Race and skin tone seem to be used interchangeably in this complaint. I see "persons of color" and "racial bias" in consecutive claims. If the sensors are biased, they are certainly biased against skin tones rather than races: a light skinned black person will get a better reading than a dark skinned one. That is, it's not that the sensor says "black person detected, shutting down", it's just not as good at picking up darker skin tones because of the limitations of the inexpensive sensor technology they went with. It seems like racial bias is a hot take, but they may have a better case that Apple engaged in false advertising, especially if they showed anyone in their marketing for whom the sensor was unlikely to be accurate.
> Isn't this a bigger problem involving all pulse oximeters?
This is largely about how Apple Watch pulse oximetry feature was marketed vs. how pulse oximetry actually works, so, without taking a position on the merits of the suit, it is quite possible for Apple to legitimately be in the wrong here and other sellers of pilse oximeters not to be, even if Apple Watch pulse oximetry works exactly like pulse oximetry generally.
https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Blood_Oxygen_app_... describes in pretty solid detail that Apple specifically explored skin color and claims they found no effect on performance. If that's actually true then they'll have no trouble showing that the case is invalid. If that's not true then the case seems ok. Either way, I don't see a lot of harm in forcing Apple to show the court.
You joke but there was a keynote where they (or maybe another tech brand.. can't remember) debuted their new special camera AI that was less discriminatory against black faces (by underexposing them of course).
This is a bunch of nonsense, the complaint itself reads like an 5th grader's English class homework assignment. It's less coherent than ChatGPT and cites no data whatsoever.
I'm a mechanical engineer. There is no way that Apple's mechanical team did not evaluate the oximeter performance against people of many skin colors. If this thing goes to trial, Apple will pull out their test data and that will be the end of the case.
I'm curious about the word 'bias' here. From a technical perspective, does the pulse oximetry sensor just have more variance on darker skin (presumably from it being more opaque and signal to noise being worse), or is there an actual bias (e.g. reads high all the time)?
Lower overall return of light which causes low SNR, how that manifests is a software question. I've worked on similar systems and read some of the papers about the pulse ox problems, the problem is pretty well known for the finger clip style devices. Watches are harder because the fit to wrist is unreliable and there is muscle and bone right under the skin. In my experience (pretty pale skin) the data quality from the Apple Watch is poor but good enough for rough trending over weeks.
> Also, did they sue Garmin and Fitbit similarly? If not, it's kind of a self confessed money grab attempt in full daylight.
They wouldn't have standing to sue Garmin and Fitbit unless they had purchased products from those companies as well.
But even if they had, it's not required to sue all possible defendants simultaneously. Sometimes plaintiffs start with the small defendants, who are more likely to settle because of lack of funds, and sometimes they start with the big ones, who are worth more and may care about the court of public opinion.
Maybe we can require people take selfies in sunlight with a known camera sensor and white balance and exposure to accurately gauge their natural skin color, then have a corrective calibration factor sent to the watch's oximeter.
I think there are different issues between cameras and pulse ox. I would guess that the SNR on a pulse ox is decreased by the additional attenuation of the LED illumination being sent in and scattered back out. It may be possible to compensate for this with increased LED brightness, but it would depend on the total degree of signal attenuation whether this is feasible given the power budget.
For an imaging sensor, the sensors are designed to be sensitive at different wavelengths and in different dynamic ranges, with some historical set points determined by major manufacturers being located in Japan. While darker tones do imply less collected light, this seems like a very solvable problem with in-camera image processing.
Another interesting question is around non-invasive neural sensors. Many EEG electrodes work relatively poorly in thick or curly hair, and there's been several efforts to develop EEG electrodes appropriate for natural hair [0]
1. Apple, Inc. (“Defendant”) manufactures, markets, and sells the Apple Watch, purporting to measure the oxygen level of a wearer’s blood directly from their wrist (“Product”).
2. The interest in blood oxygen levels extends began at least two hundred years ago hot air balloon flyers and mountain climbers needed to ensure survival.
3. Later, these groups included astronauts, pilots and divers.
4. The early devices, were used in a person’s ear, used light-based technology or
spectrophotometry to measure oxygen levels.
5. In the 1970s, a fingertip oximeter was invented that was easier to use than its predecessors.
6. For decades, there have been reports that such devices were significantly less accurate in measuring blood oxygen levels based on skin color.
7. The “real world significance” of this bias lay unaddressed until the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic, which converged with a greater awareness of structural racism which exists in many aspects of society.
8. Researchers confirmed the clinical significance of racial bias of pulse oximetry using records of patients taken during and before the pandemic.
9. The conclusion was that “reliance on pulse oximetry to triage patients and adjust supplemental oxygen levels may place Black patients at increased risk for hypoxemia.”
10. Since health care recommendations are based on readings of their blood oxygen levels, white patients are more able to obtain care than those with darker skin when faced with equally low blood oxygenation.
11. While traditional fingertip pulse oximeters are capable of measuring blood oxygen levels and heart rate, wrist-worn devices like the Product determine heart rate, as blood oxygen measurements from the wrist are believed inaccurate.
12. Algorithms designed for fingertip sensing are inappropriate when based on wrist measurements, and can lead to over 90% of readings being unusable.
13. Though one recent study concluded the Product was able to detect reduced blood oxygen saturation in comparison to medical-grade pulse oximeters this fails to recognize the failings of pulse oximetry in general with respect to persons of color.
14. As a result of the false and misleading representations, the Product is sold at a premium price, approximately no less than $400, excluding tax and sales.
This seems like an attempt to hold up Apple as some kind of proxy for the medical industry. I'm not sure what they hope to get out of this, other than raising awareness of a long-standing problem with pulse oximeters and dark skin (I certainly didn't know about it before now).
I think in order to bring a lawsuit you have to actually have a relationship with the particular company. So it would take someone who bought a thing to sue over it failing to uphold its claims. If the suit against Apple for the Apple Watch works, I would absolutely expect other vendors to follow.
2-6. Thank you for the history of vaguely functionally competitive devices from sellers other than the defendant, but what the hell does that have to do with Apple's watch?
7-8. Also seems unrelated to Apple or Apple Watches, but rather to non-Apple fingertip devices.
9. Perhaps an alternative conclusion is "Healthcare workers probably shouldn't be [and almost certainly aren't] triaging patients of any skin color with a consumer watch."? Since they're not using Apple devices for this purpose, to any extent that they're drawing inaccurate conclusions for care based on devices which use the same underlying theory but aren't actually made by Apple, that is not Apple's responsibility.
10. It's a good thing then that healthcare workers aren't using these Apple devices to triage, direct, or prioritize care. To the extent that non-Apple healthcare workers are using non-Apple devices to improperly direct this care, that is certainly a concern, but is not Apple's concern.
11-14. Thank you for getting back to something relevant to your suit; not sure why you wasted the court's time with items 2-10.
Racism requires intent. Even if they KNEW of the discrepancy, they have to optimize towards something. Did Apple do this because they dont like black people? Going to be hard to prove that but it wouldn't be surprising if the plaintiffs gets a payout none-the-less.
> Racism requires intent. . Even if they KNEW of the discrepancy, they have to optimize towards something. Did Apple do this because they dont like black people?
They aren't charged with “racism”, which, incidentally, also isn't, per se, illegal. So even if that was true of racism, it isn't relevant.
They are charged with fraud under various laws, breach of warranty, and unjust enrichment, some of which require intent, but not the intent you describe (racial animus).
I expect that similar lawsuits will be filed against other smart watch vendors such as Garmin. They all use oximeters that work in essentially the same way. (I am not making any claim about the legal merits of this case.)
This became a bigger deal with COVID, because crashing O2 levels could occur even when someone is subjectively feeling relatively fine - e.g., they think they've got mild COVID and then are all of a sudden at deaths door with little warning. Not something most people generally need though.
For healthy people in normal conditions it's rather pointless. Continuous monitoring can be useful for patients with known or suspected pulmonary conditions, such as emphysema, COVID-19, or pneumonia. Monitoring during sleep can be useful for diagnosing sleep apnea. There is also an edge case for high altitude mountaineering and flying in unpressurized aircraft where hypoxia can be an issue.
It's marketed as being accurate. It's not for large segments of the population. This is clearly a serious problem (and with all pulse oximeters). How is that absurd?
Of course they didn't do it to specifically disadvantage black people, but they clearly did not do their due diligence to make sure it worked properly with black people. That's the issue. You're doing semantic quibbling over your own particular notion of what "racism" is.
The Apple Watch oximeter functionality -- basically a pretty silly gimmick -- is explicitly marketed as “not intended for medical use” and “only designed for general fitness and wellness purposes.” The problems that optical oximeters have with darker skin is well known, painfully obvious, and a basic reality of physics.
Is it? Apple got a FDA certification for the ECG, if that isn't for all consumers it's a problem.
On another note, the FDA handing out "certification" in addition to "approval" seems like a deliberate way to confuse consumers when one is basically a stamp for money.