SR22 Down - Gulf of Mexico

[Stingray Don]

Saw this on Facebook. Apparently, the pilot was not responding. Sounds like hypoxia or other medical event. He was on a PnP mission. Very sad.

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N325JK

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I believe the finger device measures the redness of your blood, or some such thing, to determine the O2 saturation, so it wouldn't work well on your wrist. They would need to come up with another way to measure.

They typically measure light absorption at 2 wavelengths. One has the same absorption for oxygenated and de-oxygenated hemoglobin whereas the other wavelength has different absorption by those two types of hemoglobin. By comparing the ratio of the two one can compute the O2 saturation.

The difficulty with a wrist location would be the relative opacity of the skin there to these wavelengths.