Science Friday - An App For People Of Color To Rate Their Birthing Experiences | How Different Animals See

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Irth is a “Yelp-like” app to help expectant parents make informed decisions by exposing bias and racism in healthcare systems. Also, a new video camera system shows the colors of the natural world as different animals see them.An App For People Of Color To Rate Their Birthing ExperiencesFor some patients, finding a good doctor can be as simple as looking up a doctor’s degrees and accolades. But for people who are more likely to experience discrimination in a medical setting—perhaps due to their gender, disability, sexual orientation or race—credentials only tell half the story. So how do you know where to go? And who to trust?One app aims to help Black and brown parents-to-be make informed decisions about where they choose to give birth. Black people who give birth in the United States are far more likely than their white counterparts to experience mistreatment in hospitals, develop complications, or die due to childbirth.Irth allows parents to leave reviews about how their birthing experience went, like: Did doctors and nurses listen to them? Was their pain taken seriously? Did they develop complications that could’ve been prevented?Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks with Kimberly Seals Allers—journalist, activist, and founder of Irth—about why she founded the app and how it can help people.You can learn more about Irth and download the app on their website.Are Roses Red, And Violets Blue? Depends On Your SpeciesOver the millenia, animal eyes have evolved along different paths, adding or subtracting capabilities as they adapt to specific niches in the world. The result of all that evolution is that a bee, bird, or bull doesn’t see the world the same way you do. There are differences in the spatial resolution different animals can see, in the speed of their visual response, in the depth of focus, and in the way they process color.Dogs, for instance, can’t really see red—their vision is best at seeing things that are blue or yellow. Birds and bees can see into the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, making a flower look quite different from the way humans perceive it.This week, researchers published details of a video camera system that tries to help make sense of the way different animals view color. By combining different cameras, various filters, and a good dose of computer processing, they can simulate what a given video clip might look like to a specific animal species. It’s work that’s of interest to both biologists and filmmakers. Dr. Daniel Hanley, one of the researchers on the project and an assistant professor of biology at George Mason University, joins guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross to describe the system and its capabilities.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A new video camera system can help people experience the colors of nature as other animals see them. If you look at flowers, for example, they might be beautiful to arrive, but they're not really intended for us to be looking at. It's Monday, January 29th, but it's not a blue Monday. It's Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer Charles Bergquist. A little later today, we'll hear how researchers are trying to better understand how bees, birds, and other animals see the colorful world using a new video camera system. But first, guest host Ariel Duam Ross talks with the creator of an app that seeks to improve the birthing experience for people of color. Here's Ariel. For some patients, finding a good doctor can be as simple as looking up a doctor's degrees and accolades. But for people who are more likely to experience discrimination in a medical setting, perhaps due to their gender, disability, sexual orientation, or race, degrees only tell half the story.

So how do you know where to go? and who to trust. One app aims to help black and brown parents to be make informed decisions about where they choose to give birth. Because black people who give birth are far more likely than their white counterparts to experience mistreatment in a hospital setting, to develop complications, or to die due to childbirth. Joining me now to talk about the app is my next guest. Kimberly Seals Allers is the executive director of Narrative Nation and the founder of the app Earth, spelled I-R-T-H. Kimberly, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you launched Earth in 2021. Where did you get the idea for this app? Well, a lot came from my own personal experience. So, you know, when I had my first child, I did lots of research, read all the things, read all those media lists about the best place to give birth. I went to a highly rated hospital by many common measures and really had a,

poor experience. I walked out feeling incredibly disrespected, traumatized, unseen, and I really spent the early part of my motherhood blaming myself, like, what did I do wrong? And I realized that people are just not being treated the same way, even at the same place. And that despite, you know, having degrees and being blessed to not be poor, the reality was at that time in my life, I was not yet married. And I was in grad school, so I was on student insurance. And so my treatment was as an unwed black woman with basic insurance. And, you know, it never dawned on me that those things could impact the care that I received. But we know, as you pointed out in your introduction, that this is disproportionately happening and it disproportionately leads to death

among a black birthing people. Right. So you basically developed a tool that could have helped you if you had had access to this before you gave birth. Absolutely. I wish I could have read reviews from other black women or other folks who, you know, were in my same socioeconomic status or had my insurance type or my relationship status. And so we created Earth, particularly for black and brown birthing people to find and leave reviews of people just like them. Because, you know, this is a better indicator of what type of treatment you are more likely to receive by knowing how what other people like you experience at that doctor or hospital. Absolutely. So I want to get more into this, but before we move on, where did the name for the app come from?

Well, Earth is like the word birth, but we drop the B for bias. So we're all about dropping the B out of the birth experience. And so that is the name Earth, I-R-T-H. Got it. Okay. So if I open the Earth app, what kind of information would I see? So if you open the Earth app, we know we have two core functionalities, which is you can search for reviews. You can search by doctor name, hospital name, zip code, city and state. And you can leave a review. You can leave a review of your prenatal appointments. You can leave a review of your birth experience, your postpartum appointment, and pediatric reviews up to baby's first birthday. And not only do we accept reviews from the birthing person, but we accept review some fathers and partners. We accept review some duels because we know that they see a lot, right? We have a special icon in the app so our users can see that a duel has left the review. And I think what's most important about, you know, not to mention just the front-in functionality, but on the back end, we turn these reviews into data to literally help hospitals improve their care, to provide more respectful and equitable care for black and brown

birthing people. We're doing that now with hospitals in eight states, and we're excited about centering that black and brown patient experience as the tool for how hospitals can improve. So wait, you're not only helping inform patients. You're also helping then improve the treatment at various hospitals by partnering with them? Absolutely. This is really the impact model behind what we do at Earth as a nonprofit instrument. But yeah, you know, hospitals simply are not getting enough patient experience feedback. Data shows that black and brown folks are not responding to hospital administered surveys.

We know that the medical trust gap has been well documented between health system and community of color. And so they simply don't have enough feedback to improve care. And unfortunately, I speak to far too many hospitals that feel like, oh, because we haven't had a maternal death in two years, five years, ten years, that they're doing great. Not killing us doesn't mean we had the experience that we deserve. Right. Okay. So let's talk about what you've learned.

You know, what have you noticed with your users and their reviews? Have you noticed any overlap in experience? Absolutely. So right now, the number one negative experience being reported in Earth, and we have reviews from 46 states. is my pain levels were dismissed. Number two, most reported negative practice behavior, as we call it, is my request for help or ignored or refused. The number two, negative reported experience in our nationwide database is my request for help were ignored or refused. Number three is a reporting that I was scolded, yelled at a threatened, deeply concerning to see the number of black families

who are being threatened with authorities, CPS, etc. when they are making decisions about their babies and their bodies that they're quite frankly allowed to make. Next come physical privacy violated. And so we are seeing a trend. And the thing that's so striking, and the reason why Earth has the potential to be life-saving is that when you look at pretty much every black maternal death story that you've read, somebody's pain levels were dismissed and somebody was asking for help and they were ignored.

So when we see these things in high frequency, we want Earth to be an early warning detection system to alert hospitals like, hey, some of the practice behaviors that we know disproportionately lead to death are happening in high frequency in your facility. And we have a way to help you through our improvement plan to actually address this, to approve the overall experience, and to save lives. Wow. Okay. So from what I understand, since you launched the app, you've gathered reviews from 46 states. You have 20,000 users. Do you have a sense for what kind of impact the app has had on those users? You know, what are you hearing from them? Oh, absolutely. And we highlight these folks on our social media platforms all the time, you know, our amazing users who are

sharing their stories, who are talking about how they did the search. We have parents coming in for their own children doing searches to see where they might have a better experience. And so this is a big part of what we believe in, that we can inform and protect each other, and that crowdsource peer reviews are a tool for safety for black and brown birthing people. Kimberly Seals Allers is the executive director of Narrative Nation and the founder of the app, Earth, spelled I-R-T-H. Kimberly, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me.

Over the millennia, animal eyes have evolved along different paths, adding or subtracting capabilities to adapt to a specific niche in the world. And the result is, a B doesn't see the world the same way you do. There are differences in the spatial resolution different animals can see in the speed of their visual response, in the depth of focus. And of course, in the way different animals process color. For instance, I learned that my dogs can't really see red. Their vision is best at seeing things that are blue or yellow.

Hot tip, many dogs are big fans of the TV. show Bluey because the show's use of blues pops out at them. This week, researchers published details of a video camera system that tries to help make sense of the way different animals view color. By combining different cameras, various filters, and a good dose of computer processing, they can simulate what a given video clip might look like to a specific animal species. It's work that is of interest to both biologists and to filmmakers. Joining me now to talk this is one of the researchers on the project. Dr. Daniel Hanley is an assistant professor of biology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ariel. Thank you for having me.

And we have some example videos from the project on our website at sciencefriiday.com slash animal vision. So Daniel, how different are animal eyes from one species to another? There are lots of different ways of constructing eyes. We focus mostly on how those different eyes can receive color information. And our paper looks at many different types of eyes. These are what are termed dichromatic, meaning that they have two different kinds of photoreceptors, trichromatic like us, which organisms have three different types of photoreceptors, and even tetachromatic. So birds actually have an extra photoreceptors. They have four different photoreceptors. And even if there's commonalities, So even if we happen to be a trichromat and a B might be a trichromag, there are lots of differences

between organisms. Why all of these differences? Why isn't an eye just an eye? Well, there's interesting evolutionary histories in the evolution of those photoreceptors that allowed organisms, for example, detect food items and whether they were ripe or fresh. If you looked at our own green photoreceptor, for example, there's an interesting evolutionary history there, and it's much more similar in its sensitivity to our red photoreceptor and other organisms that have green photoreceptors see different kinds of green.

And so it really all comes down to what that organism needed to detect. If you look at some other objects like flowers, for example, they're beautiful to arrive, but they're not really intended for us to be looking at. Meaning that species who really, really rely on flowers like bees, for instance, they'll see flowers differently. Precisely. Can you tell me about this camera system? You know, what does it let you do that's new? Yeah, for sure. The camera system is actually built around two different cameras. And the reason that we did this was because we didn't have good tools at our disposal that would allow us to capture animal perceived colors in motion. There were lots of tools that we had, for example,

spectropetometers and other multispectral cameras that provide really accurate and high quality data that we can use for understanding colors in general. But what they didn't allow us to do were to see the same kind of display or activity or colors if they were moving. For example, if a bird was dancing or showing off its feathers in a certain way, you would have to switch out your lens or switch out a filter and you would actually miss much of that behavior. It missed the spatial components, temporal components. And of course, by the time you switched your lens, that either the bird or the animal would be gone or that behavior, half of the behavior would be missing. So is this the kind of tool that could be useful in a documentary about nature? Like,

am I going to end up seeing what a lion sees, for instance, when it's hunting one day? Absolutely. I would love to see what the prey of the lion is seeing. And so that was part of the intent. Yeah, when we made this camera, we really wanted to bridge the gap between science and science communication. It's a National Geographic-funded project, and that was one of the main goals that's the storyteller. So somebody can go to the field and capture these beautiful images and captivate audiences about nature. They can actually go and record primary data, and that data would actually be, if collected properly, useful for a scientist. And is this camera system tuned for a specific animal, or is this a general purpose

a system where you have this library that you can just, you know, plug in a specific species and all of a sudden you see what they would see. Yeah, it's definitely more of the latter. It's a general purpose system. I love the way you sort of phrased that. As long as you know a little bit about the organism's vision, you can project into their visual space. And we've preloaded it with a few different organisms that the user could choose from, but many users might actually want to optimize it for their own species of interest. Your system can go beyond the colors that people see, right? There are things that we as humans don't see. You mentioned bees and bird vision, but what other animals make use of those extra colors?

Right. Our camera sees into the ultraviolet. Many other organisms, many insects, birds, lizards, many mammals have access to visual information that's outside the range of what is detectable to humans. One that's quite interesting is the caribou and reindeer. And so you can sort of imagine the utility of having the ability to have the ability to, to peek into the ultraviolet range if you're a caribou that lives in a habitat dominated by short shrubbery snow that reflects all light and polar bear like our hair polar bear's hair absorbs ultraviolet

radiations and so having the ability to peek into the ultraviolet will allow them to see their predator against otherwise white backdrop so that's our focus but somebody else might modify this design so one of the things that we really liked about or we tried to do for our project is make it very modular. So if you were more interested in longer wave bands rather than shorter wave bands, you can focus on that as an infrared camera. You could probably modify this to some extent if you're interested in polarized light. It's not a polarized light camera. But some people are interested in other domains, other types of visual information. I feel like you've touched on this a little bit, but I still want to ask you, why is this camera system so important?

So many of the signals and behaviors that we learn about in evolutionary biology and ecology have some element of motion in them. Imagine a male bird that's dancing and showing off his feathers and trying to impress a female. Think of like a bird of paradise, for example. That bird of paradise is using its space. it's showing off its feathers in its best light. And some individuals are just better at doing this than others.

And so to really understand that signal, we have to capture it from the eye of the female. Many times that female might be impressed in that male that's displaying in this way because he's managed to survive. That means that she mates with him, her young also have these beautiful feathers and have whatever agility, strength, ingenuity, because he's avoided predation, despite these conspicuous and elaborate colors. Faked into that question, then, therefore, is that that same display, that same motion, that same activity, it has to be seen from the eyes of two individuals that might see differently. The female, we're trying to impress, and the predator that he's trying to avoid. And we didn't have a tool that allowed us to capture and measure that same activity, that same

display from two eyes. Right. I mean, you know, we look at a mating display and we think we understand what is attractive about it. But really, we're missing so much information or taking in the wrong information. And your system really puts that on display. What would you want to do to extend this work, you know, to push it even further? So there are lots of different potential directions. So right now we're interested in capturing as many of these visual displays in motion as we can. And one of the reasons that we want to do that is because I think that we've missed a lot, right? Because we can have the tools necessary to ask the right questions. And so lead author, Vera Vossas and I, we are both really excited by the potential that this has

to instill curiosity and genuine inquiry that really forms the basis of the scientific method. A tool like this can really excite people to explore what's in their own backyards. And so much of the 19th and 20th and even into the 21st century has been testing hypotheses that develop from these primary observations and discoveries. We think that there could be a lot that's out there yet to be uncovered. Well, that sure sounds exciting. Daniel, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a been pleasure. Dr. Daniel Hanley is an assistant professor of biology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. We have some example videos from the project on our website at Science Friday.com

slash Animal Vision. That's about all the time we have for today. A lot of folks helped make the show happen, including Nehima Ahmed. Emma Gomez. Annie Niro. George Harper. And many more.

In our next episode, the search for what might be behind the rise of a quote-unquote mystery respiratory illness in dogs. Thanks for listening. I'm sci-fire producer Charles Berkwist. We'll see you soon.