Radiation FID chips

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the shielding standards of hospital equipment are to prevent emissions rather than to protect from transmissions. You say there have been no deaths from RFID yet but that isn't known, nobody has looked for them before. If they are truly so damaging as the report implies then there may well have been deaths.

Bad, or rather misplaced technology. I am reminded of the advert for asbestos 'to cap for tiny nerves in a sensitive tooth'.

http://www.icsurveys.co.uk/asbestos-fire-curtain.jpg

It's slogan 'When you think of Asbestos you think of Johns-Manville' also applies when you think of asbestosis or the Asbestos Strike. There is still asbestos in your kids crayons and talcum powder so why not chip them too. None of their hospital equipment will work but at least you'll know if someone has snatched them.

This won't be a popular view here but neorosurgeon Dr Vini Khurana says on mobile phones "It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking". It is always the surgeons, not the engineers, who notice the health risks first.

Not just RFID

I really hope they've specified good shielding on all the ordinary computers they use.

And then there is the cellular telephone farm on top of the local hospital.

sheilding inside the casing?

might be a good idea.

Reader not tag?

It is very important in these sorts of research to indicate how and indeed what tests were performed.

In this case the abstract is not exactly explicit, but it appears that it is the readers that are being testing not the tags themselves (I get this from the statement that the "readers were 30cm from the medical device).

As the readers transmit RF signals (especially passive systems as the rf signal needs to be strong enough to power the tag) it is not unexpected that the readers could cause interference with the medical devices.

However I would be surprised if the signal from the tags were anywhere near strong enough to cause EMI in the medical devices.

Not Fit For Purpose

Surely if life critical hosptial equipment is this susceptable to interference then the equipment isn't fit for purpose and the manufacturers should be forced to fix there machines at their own costs

Effects HAVE been looked for

And not found. We have a RFID (active, on WiFi frequencies) installation in our hospital and we spent months trying to provoke any reaction from sensitive equipment including anaesthetic machines, ventilators and cardiac telemetry systems. Neither during testing nor since installation have any problems been found and we are continually looking out for them (If any equipment acted oddly at all, we would assume the RFID was guilty until proven otherwise). Maybe we just have more robust (ie better designed) critical care equipment than the Yanks....

Even though we couldn't find/provoke any effects, we still specified a minimum distance greater than 1m between any transmitter and any electronic equipment, 100mW maximum power output and no readers in the ITU, HDU, but maybe that's because we aren't the kind of people who put high powered transmitters 30 cm from ventilators to see if we can kill someone..........

My local hospital

uses jammers to block cell signals in different parts of the building, such as the lobby to maternity and the ObER and delivery rooms, but not the maternity rooms themselves...isn't this just as likely to cause problems as the cell signal itself? If so, I don't buy the EMI stuff. They also provide wireless APs in some of the same jammed areas. I doubt the rfid tags will cause any problems if neither of the other two signals are, unless they just happen to be on poorly chosen frequencies. I think the equipment in the field is probably better equipped to handle such interference than we are told...seems to be the fear of the most remote chance that EMI could occur. I've not researched it, but I have never heard of any scenarios where actual EMI did occur and was noticed/reported/harmful.

The real problem is crap life support systems.

To me this suggests that those affected pieces of critical hospital equipment are really overpriced crap that don't have proper electrical shielding.

Purpose

The problem, like many new tech solutions, is that no one really tests things in their operating environment anymore. They test in a lab, or with a ridiculously small sample, and then point the blame and someone else when the lack of real-world testing causes a problem. In this case it's like building a submarine at home and considering it deep water worthy when the only testing has been in the backyard pool.

The medical equipment was there first so the problem is with the RFID tech. Otherwise it's like blaming indigenous peoples for screwing up the country - and we all know how to solve indigenous peoples issues.

More studies needed!!

I'm not disputing the result of the studies but can't still find the connection. As one reader pointed out previously, the tags may not be the problem here. If this is truly the case, then future medical equipments should be built in a way that the RFID tags do not affect them. RFID tags will always be in use and with 'smart dust' also now on the horizon, it's time that further studies be conducted to ascertain the facts: We Are Smart Dust, We Are Golden ( http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=526&doc_id=152005&F_src=flftwo)

@Josh - jammer vs phone

It's possible that a jammer could could less of a problem than a 2G phone. 2G phones use TDMA which involves the transmitter turning on and off very quickly. That's why you hear that dig-dig-dig sound from your radio when a 2G phone is transmitting. 3G phones use CDMA so they transmit continuously. As, presumably would a jammer. So it's possible that the two have different effects (I make no comment over which are benign and which aren't)

But I do ask the question - if mobile phones are so deadly in hospitals, why do Doctors in Australia carry them on their hips? They aren't special ones. They're standard phones. And they use them in preference to pagers a lot of the time.

And to AC above, why does this story prove that people who have been complaining about mobile phone rules in hospitals were wrong. The story is about RFID scanners, not phones. And there's also a difference between caused interference and actually caused malfunction, although I really do understand the desire to be conservative with people's lives and consider those two almost equivalent.

Pissing yourself in a dark suit

I don't know how to solve indigenous peoples issues. More relevantly, I also don't know how hospital equipment that is susceptible to RFID devices can withstand a mobile phone jammer Josh describes. Something to do with frequency or power I suppose but it is counter-intuitive I used to be an electronics design engineer, digital not RF, but have been away from that so long as to make it almost irrelevant. In those days only military stuff was insulated against interference. Domestic stuff, even high grade stuff like hospital equipment, was only shielded to prevent emissions, not to protect the device from other EMI.

I once got a budget to shield the backs of VDUs in council buildings, about £80. Some metallic spray and some metallic tape, lot's of work. I don't know if it had a beneficial effect but it gave me a warm feeling in that job. "Doing a good job here is like pissing yourself in a dark suit. It gives you a warm feeling but nobody notices" - Unisys toilet grafitti.

RFID seems better suited to a warehouse than a dispensary. I know all techniques are fallible and therefore fatal in hospitals but if this report is to be believed then RFID is more problems than it is worth. Bar codes can do roughly the same job without the extra risks or expense.

@Danny

You need to brush up on your history then buddy. England, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. have centuries of handling those problems.

Firefox doesn't recognize New Zealand as being spelled correctly. Someone should fix that.

RFID interference - from a developer

As has correctly been pointed out, in passive systems the tags themselves have no power source and communicate solely by modulating the backscatter of the RF transmitted by the reader. The amount of RF thus backscattered is of the order of microwatts - the tags of themselves are harmless.

A reader (of passive tags) on the other hand is a different issue - it has to transmit significant power levels for the tag to power itself up and backscatter a response. This power level is (usually) configurable, depending on what range at which you want to be able to read tags. Systems where tags are to be passed across a scanner may only need 100mW TX power, whereas portal readers in use by warehouses and baggage handling systems are likely to use 2W (the maximum allowed by FCC and ETSI).

At 100mW I'm not sure what effect it has on electronic equipment (I didn't notice any) - but at 2W the system on my desk, at a distance of 1m, rendered my landline phone unusable due to the audible interference! Makes me wonder what it was doing to me...

Glowing with health.

Radio attacks on embedded medical devices already published

See

"Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses"

presented and published last month in

Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

by a completely disjoint set of authors, and covered back in March in many technology and mainstream news journals.