SAFA Skysailor Magazine

51 SPRING 2025 | September-October-November SKY SAILOR purposes it is not feasible to use in the air. Taking a glove off and operating whilst in flight is impractical and potentially unsafe. Fingerless gloves will improve things, but only slightly. Run a web search of ‘SPO2 devices’ and you’ll get a bunch of results for fingertip devices. Change that to ‘SPO2 wristwatch devices’ and you’ll get a whole heap of devices, as well as sites recommending the best smartwatches with an oxygen sensor. The two wrist devices that I purchased in 2019 to evaluate are no longer available. These operated in two different ways. One presented the result on the screen of the device itself and the second relied on an app on your smart phone to initiate the measurement and present the results. While cleaning out my late father’s home, I snavelled his smartwatch, a Samsung Galaxy unit, which has SPO2 measurement capability. Dear old Dad. In his later years he was always updating his phone or laptop as, ‘It’s doing stupid things’. Usually though the device was okay, but Dad was in decline, I digress. Figure 2: Samsung Health app; SPO2 results