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RFID Tags Can Interfere With Medical Devices
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jun 24, 2008 05:17 PM
from the mind-how-you-radiate dept.
from the mind-how-you-radiate dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new study suggests RFID systems can cause 'potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices.' (Here is the JAMA study's abstract.) Among other things, electrical interference changed breathing machines' ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop. Some hospitals have already begun using RFID tags to track a wide variety of medical devices, but the new finding suggests the systems may have unintended consequences."
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Submission: Study: RFID Tags Can Mess Up Medical Devices by Anonymous Coward
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This is too much (Score:2, Insightful)
The radio frequency identification, or RFID, is an inherently flawed idea [wikipedia.org]. It is a technological solution to a social problem that it created. It is a threat to our security [cnet.com], our privacy [junkbusters.com], our freedom [spychips.com], and now also our health! And this is not a just conspiracy theory. Some of the most respectable members of our society are protesting against RFID technology, including Bruce Schneier [schneier.com] and even Richard Stallman [stallman.org]. My only question is, how much more insult to our intelligence can we take as a society before we sta
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Yes, but... think of the all of the jobs it would create for snails! [slashdot.org]
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By merely asking the questions and and taking an outraged tone you're really doing no more than the people you're chastising. Instead of making vague mentions of what "we" should do, name a time and a place for people in your area to congregate and discuss action to take, and perhaps set up a website to help others in their area do the same.
I don't disagree with your sentiment one bit, which is why I encourage you to take your own advice.
If you're now thinking that I'm a hypocrite for not doing the same I'l
Re:This is too much (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Because "quickly locating a very expensive portable medical device which may have been left in the wrong room in a 10,000-room hospital" is a problem that didn't exist before those evil overlords invented it. Heck, even the "gee it would be nice to track my supply chain better" problems are fundamentally real. And these things work.
You talk of privacy issues and such? Oh, you betcha! They're real. But you can't pretend it's not a useful technology. That is the real insult to intelligence in this thread.
Parent
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If they want to put them on expensive medical equipment, I'm OK with that. But I absolutely don't want them on anything I carry,or wear, or my car, or my bike, not even my rollerblades. Certainly not on my currency or anything I use as currency. And I don't want them on my self (Google "SWIFT" and be appalled).
Besides the fact that I find this surveillance culture creepy as hell, and absolutely do not trust any of the people who are likely to have access
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Also, if you have scanners in highly-trafficked doorways, you can at least get a good idea of where a passively-tagged item is based on the last one it passed through, and possibly the last few (to give you a rough vector).
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Re:This is too much (Score:5, Insightful)
I am on the same page as you. I suspect I am old enough to be one of the few people here who have had to do pre-IT work in my younger days. I once worked for a gigantic (800,000 sq ft) food distribution center. Many times, the outside of pallets "packages" would have the bar codes scraped off them due to handling with forklifts, lift-clamps, etc. If I had the option of just driving a big palette of food products through a scanning device that counted the products and gave me weights automatically, it would have added up to likely 10 hours of time saved per loader a week. Not to mention the hazards of having to get on and off an industrial lift repeatedly all day long, the shock to joints, the static discharge (sometimes reaching an 8" arc), and so on would have been nice to cut down on.
My impression with a lot of the folks who play a scared advocate on such technologies don't have much of a grasp of what the rest of the world has to put up with in their day-to-day experiences and could care less about their lives being easier, because, there *might* be some madman somewhere ready to spy on them given the chance. These same people probably do their banking online, have credit cards, and homes without decent security systems. Those are the real things to worry about, in my opinion.
This same line of thought often reminds me of the "sticking it to the man" attitude I see around here a lot. Like "It's about time Company X learned it's lesson", well, Company X doesn't usually learn a lesson. The individuals on the lower end of the employment ladder just get treated worse, while the shareholders and executives don't really have much to worry about. Or, "Corporate greed", got to love that one. It's the individual greed of many people combined with a lot of Joes trying to keep their households afloat. There I go rambling again.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Yea, um. Ok, I'll start protesting against the insult to my intelligence that is your posts. I mean, since you requested action, I feel compelled to deliver.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Right up until you brought up Richard Stallman.
That guy would protest clean underwear, not just RFID tagged underwear.
Next.
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Nothing wrong with clean underwear, but if you're wearing underwear, anyone who doubts its cleanliness should be able to inspect it themselves.
Oh, please (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets take these points one by one. First, it is not a flawed idea, it is a flawed implementation. All privacy concerns can be easily mitigated, with or without cooperation from RFID manufacturers. Pop your undies in the microwave for ten seconds and they won't be reporting back to the mothership, don't worry. Second, they are a technological solution to a physical, not social problem: inventory tracking. The fact that they are being used in other ways does not change the fact that this is what they were invented for, and they do a good job keeping costs down and efficiency up.
Bruce was complaining about their use in passports. So, screen the passports so they can't be read unless opened. Besides the passport issue, here is Stallman's fear:
Parent
Re:Oh, please (Score:5, Funny)
But it is what's in my undies that concerns me...
on another tangent...
But how do I know that my microwave doesn't have an RFID reader that enables it to know that there is an RFID tag inside and it only goes through the motions of microwaving my undies, thereby rendering any RFID chip(s) in my undies untouched and fully functional? Far fetched? Future microwave dinners and popcorn might have RFID tags embedded which tell various microwave oven how long to cook the product. Can I get thicker tinfoil for my hat?
Parent
Re:Oh, please (Score:4, Funny)
Oh man, you are using actual tinfoil for your hat? You know that's made from aluminum, right? Aluminum amplifies the mind control rays.
Parent
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Fear not, Ice T and Henry Rollins will have a microwave that is free of government control. You will be able to take your undies to them for sanitization.
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Let's take
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yhbt lol
Are you serious? Nobody caught this? The poster's name is MENSA BABE ffs!! His signature uses BRITISH SPELLING!! His writing style comes straight out of Hillary Clinton's campaign!
This man may be the biggest troll in the world.
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Interference in medicine (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting -- Slashdot has talked about this kind of thing before and I remember responding:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234315&cid=19078365 [slashdot.org]
Every time I read something like this I get a bit frustrated. I can't paste the whole article for copyright reasons, but I am hoping a kind AC will. Either way, the gist of the article is that when very close (some have interference "distances" of 0.1 cm) RFID active readers / transmitters may interfere with some medical equipment.
The interobserver variability in the study was high, and they defined an event very broadly, essentially as any change in the operation of a device. It is a bit aggressive -- and I fear that good technology may inadvertently be stifled for "interference" concerns...
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Believe it or not, but you too can actually post as AC! It's amazing, I know! Just check that box you see right after the subject of your post.
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Get used to it. I post something insightful and it gets modded funny. I post a witty response, it gets modded offtopic. I get pissed and write a rant, it's modded insightful.
I stopped trying to understand moderators.
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And the paranoids are after us all. TFA doesn't paint this as A Big Deal. It's just another thing to watch for. That's why hospitals typically don't allow cell phones in patient critical areas (and then wildly overestimate the danger potential and try to ban them everywhere which of course doesn't work). The ONLY time the problems
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And the paranoids are after us all. TFA doesn't paint this as A Big Deal. It's just another thing to watch for. That's why hospitals typically don't allow cell phones in patient critical areas (and then wildly overestimate the danger potential and try to ban them everywhere which of course doesn't work).
In the UK at least the reason for the blanket ban is so they can push their expensive 'Patientline' phones. It's rigidly enforced.. they'll physically throw you out if they see a mobile phone near a ward...
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Uh oh, I see an upcoming "payphone gap" - we'd better get right on this. I'll just go tell our CEO about this....
Actually, with the current day bed charges in the US we should be giving the patient a phone, an iPod and a laptop every time they spend the night.
More Slashdot pseudo-science (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is a quote, a comment [wsj.com] to the Wall Street Journal story:
"interference changed breathing machines' ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop."
These things are FCC regulated. Should I feel safe knowing that not only are some of the systems in a hospital sensitive to EMF below FCC limits, but also that several life-critical device
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The interobserver variability in the study was high, and they defined an event very broadly
It was the same with mobile phones - in almost all circumstances they made absolutely no difference, since practically all devices are properly shielded. But we kept the "Switch off your fuckin phone" signs up because it was just plain annoying when patients (especially teenage females) are forever texting and chatting when you're trying to explain a procedure to them.
OTOH I think RFID tags and many other technological 'enhancements' are thrust upon the medical industry by IT reps and accepted by hospita
Pros and cons (Score:3, Insightful)
The field drops off at a square of distance, so a RFID reader at 10cm will have one hundredth the EM field of a reader at 1cm.
A huge % of medical deaths are due to human error (wrong drugs/dosage etc)and the correct use of RFID can go a long way to mitigate that. Clearly that would be offset if the RFID equipment was to interfere
Re:Interference in medicine (Score:4, Interesting)
I can corroborate your basic point, and the sad part is that my data is 10 years old. Back then wireless ethernet (2Mbps pre-b stuff, even) was new and we were testing for interference. The very same kinds of machines had trouble as in TFS, and it was at sub-foot ranges.
I suspect either this study tested old gear (I'm assuming our hospital used a popular vendor) or the same vendors are playing lazy. Back then, the biomedical engineering guys explained to me that the FCC granted exceptions to medical device manufacturers for emitted interference, and that an emitter is a receiver, but that most good medical products companies didn't need to bother with these exceptions, they did a fine job on principle.
Parent
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It's useful to know in case someone thinks it's a good idea to tag pacemakers with RFID tags, or thinks it's a bright idea to build an active reader powerful enough to trigger every tag in a hallway, but you're right: this is being blown way out of proportion.
Let's just hope... (Score:3, Funny)
Electromagnetic Compatability Study Needed (Score:2)
Electromagnetic compatability is a huge undertaking in the hardware world.
As an example, IEEE EMC society:
http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/ [ieee.org]
I would be very curious to know if any EMC work was done between all of theses devices? Nothing indicated of substance in the article.
my 20 cents (adjusted for inflation and to account for the energy costs per post) :)
jerry
Hazardous (Score:5, Insightful)
Need in health care for asset tracking (Score:3, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, I've been approached 3 times now by people in the health care industry who have expressed a need for some time of asset tracking software and I've always given them my brother's card (his company specializes in RFID based asset tracking). Actually, one person specifically asked me if I was capable of integrating an RFID solution into their environment. I wonder how many companies are currently developing RFID based software geared towards the health care industry only to receive a backlash from the medical community when this type of information becomes common knowledge..
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What about the backlash to the makers of the affected medical equipment? That's where any blame should lie.
Any piece of life saving equipment that can be screwed up by a low power radio transmission is not fit for purpose. These things are supposed to be built to high standards and have near zero failure rates.
FUD and title errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you ignore this article's lack of specifics or detail (which makes it more or less FUD in my view), the title /. gave it is *flatly incorrect*. It's not the tags that are causing the interference; it is the reader/interrogator. These inexpensive passive UHF tags are just that, passive; it's the active (4W) signal that might be able to interfere.
Yes, there are serious concerns with RFID, but there's no point spreading vague FUD. In medical applications, interference obviously a very serious matter. Several groups are working on this problem, so how about we wait until we have solid results before we make up our minds?
Well??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are these medical devices having problems like that? I thought medical devices were SUPPOSED to be hardened against bad things and fail over nicely.
I guess not.
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Did I say impervious?
Nope.
We, instead, could detect false signals and ring a bell on what the designer thinks is "very bad input". These device guys know how the biology works, and what signals are just impossible. Instead of catching every last remnant of EM, they could catch errors and loudly warn the nurse/physician like INTERFERENCE DETECTED signal.
If there were bad EM detectors built into life-critical devices, FCC Part 18 solves that issue rather well.
The headline is wrong, as usual. (Score:5, Insightful)
The interference came from the readers not the tags. The tags are passive.
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the implication from the limited text is that they were using the same reader (although this is not confirmed) but the difference in tags did change the issue rate, so the tags do share part of the problem.
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> the implication from the limited text is that they were using the same reader (although
> this is not confirmed) but the difference in tags did change the issue rate, so the tags
> do share part of the problem.
No they don't. The passive tags are powered by the rf they absorb from the reader so they require the reader to put out more rf. They would have gotten the same results if there had been no tags present at all and they had just done "dummy" readings. The tags themselves emit orders of magn
Don't panic! (Score:2)
There's no need to panic, politicians don't have a heart to have any side effects from this revelation.
Safety Recalls Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
The machines that suffered dangerous faults should be recalled and repaired. Keeping them away from RFID readers and other sources of rf will not suffice. The fact that rf interference could cause dangerous faults means that they contain design defects such that component failures or other sorts of damage or interference could also cause dangerous faults.
And yes, I have designed medical life support equipment, though not in this century.
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More than just the devices... (Score:2, Informative)
In the coming years most of the containers for drugs could have RFID tags. California is pushing through a new law (E-Pedigree Law http://www.pharmacy.ca.gov/about/e_pedigree_laws.shtml) that creates a chain of custody for any drug. RFID has been one of the recommended technologies to help manufactures and everyone else in the supply-chain to deal with this law.
Having boxes with hundreds of RFID tags rolling down the hallways of a hospital doesn't seem so safe now!
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It also makes it much more easier for "Highway Pirates" to target specific types of merchandise. Here in Claifornia, many truck drivers are targets of well-planned hijackings where criminals steal whatever the trucker is hauling for sale on the black market. A good RFID reader would allow gangs to easily discriminate profitable targets from unprofitable targets (i.e. iPhones and plasma TVs from spinach and brussels sprouts.).
Personally, I don't like the idea of tracking every single thing, including people,