I just want to say that I am really happy you looked into the points raised by Akash. I am not an expert in health or nutrition but did along with people close to me look into the extension of “western” datasets into non-western populations and found that for maternal health, there are somewhat large issues around gestational periods. In particular, we found that there is emerging evidence that the gestational period of persons of either African or South Asian decent might be about 1 week shorter than that of persons of European descent, on which WHOs recommendations were based. This could have large impacts as one might be too late in administering treatments to induce labor for patients of African or South Asian descent. In general, I got a feeling that the use of western datasets in recommendations for non-western populations is quite widespread and we are only starting to realize the issues this introduces in healthcare. Another data point was how blood oxygen saturation measured by those fingertip devices might have significant bias towards people with higher levels of melatonin in their skin. I think it is especially important to be aware of such issues as EA is majority white and a majority of our interventions are in non-white populations and am really happy you are also aware of reputational risks posed by using data with bias.
I just want to say that I am really happy you looked into the points raised by Akash. I am not an expert in health or nutrition but did along with people close to me look into the extension of “western” datasets into non-western populations and found that for maternal health, there are somewhat large issues around gestational periods. In particular, we found that there is emerging evidence that the gestational period of persons of either African or South Asian decent might be about 1 week shorter than that of persons of European descent, on which WHOs recommendations were based. This could have large impacts as one might be too late in administering treatments to induce labor for patients of African or South Asian descent. In general, I got a feeling that the use of western datasets in recommendations for non-western populations is quite widespread and we are only starting to realize the issues this introduces in healthcare. Another data point was how blood oxygen saturation measured by those fingertip devices might have significant bias towards people with higher levels of melatonin in their skin. I think it is especially important to be aware of such issues as EA is majority white and a majority of our interventions are in non-white populations and am really happy you are also aware of reputational risks posed by using data with bias.