Years of research have showed that pulse oximeters yield less accurate readings for people with darker skin tones, and now the US Food and Drug Administration is proposing guidance to help make these devices more reliable and less biased.

The FDA's draft recommendations for pulse oximeters aims to include clinical studies involving at least 150 participants with diverse skin tones.

The U.S. health regulator on Monday proposed new guidelines for widely-used blood oxygen monitoring devices to improve their performance across skin tones amid growing evidence that the current ones are not reliable for patients with darker skin.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed new guidance for devices used to monitor blood oxygen levels to improve their accuracy and performance across a range of skin tones.