Khayat Kanaan

Since its inception, pulse oximetry was plagued by unreliability when it was needed most–during patient motion and low perfusion. The industry had given up and considered the problem "unsolvable." Clinicians were forced to live with the results–excessive false alarms, delayed notification due to long averaging times, inaccurate data, and an inability to obtain data on the most critical patients.

Conventional pulse oximetry works under the assumption that by looking at only the pulse and normalizing the pulsating signal over the non-pulsating signal, oxygen saturation (SpO2) can be measured without calibration. Although this was a big step forward in the evolution of pulse oximetry, it has one major flaw–it assumes the only pulsating component is arterial blood. Unfortunately for conventional pulse oximetry, venous blood moves every time the patient moves or breathes. This causes conventional pulse oximeters to display false low or high SpO2 and pulse rates–resulting in false alarms as high as 90% in ICUs and recovery rooms