Course Asks University Students To Tackle Medical Device Insecurity 38
chicksdaddy writes "The University of Michigan will be among the first to offer graduate students the opportunity to study the security of advanced medical devices. The course, EECS 598-008 'Medical Device Security' will teach graduate students in UMich's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program 'the engineering concepts and skills for creating more trustworthy software-based medical devices ranging from pacemakers to radiation planning software to mobile medical apps.' The new course comes amid rapid change in the market for sophisticated medical devices like insulin pumps, respirators and monitoring stations, which increasingly run on versions of the same operating systems that power desktops and servers. In 2011, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reported that software failures were the root cause of a quarter of all medical device recalls (PDF)."
Re:overregulation... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but without these regulations, crap designed to be cheap rather than attempted as a design to work would get pushed through, and people would die, while the con artist who did it would funnel the money away and find ways to hide behind the legal system.
At least there is some competition, even if it is slowed down, there are multiple companies in the market, and each will still try to get sales from the other guy.
Does security need improved? Yes. Will it happend? Eventually, when enough people are hurt from the lack of security. Deregulation will just spur a whole new slew of issues. Maybe something should instead be done to streamline the regulations.