In France, a Second Patient Receives Permanent Artificial Heart 183
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes One of the most important goals of transhumanist medicine—possessing a perfectly healthy heart—has so far remained elusive. This week, we came a step closer when for the second time ever, a French company implanted a permanent artificial heart in a patient. More than just pumping blood, future artificial hearts will bring numerous other advantages with them. They will have computer chips and wi-fi capacity built into them. We'll control our hearts with our smart phones, tuning down its pumping capacity when we want to sleep, or tuning it up when we want to run marathons. The patient who received the first of these hearts, though he survived for 76 days, died after the heart "stopped after a short circuit, although the exact reasons behind the death were still unknown."
Wifi (Score:5, Funny)
With wifi/bluetooth capability I feel like there's not anything that could possibly go wrong. It will be important to have it connect to the cloud in order to retrieve heart rate profiles for the day.
Re:Wifi (Score:5, Funny)
You may skip this ad and restart your heart in 5s.
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Insurance companies will no longer need to profile all people, they will simply ask their pals in the health sector to lock the heart rate for life insurance ("No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'!") and put it in HNGGGGGGGG mode if their pension funds customers don't obey the proper life expectancy :)
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Yah, when I came to "it can be controlled by your cellphone", my first thought was "and it can also be controlled by the cellphone that that guy over there is holding. And he doesn't necessarily like you".
Well I dunno about you, but the first thing I would make sure of when shopping for a new heart would be that it doesn't have a remote-shutdown option. Who cares that the guy who doesn't like you can access it, if all he can do is make you slightly sleepy.
Anyway, probably the biggest cause of death with these things will be Slashdot users trying to install Open-WRT or something ....
Re:Wifi (Score:5, Funny)
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But nonetheless, the next article shows that it still seems to be safe.
"Research Finds No Large-Scale Exploits of Heartbleed ..."
When it fails (Score:5, Funny)
WIFI-Enabled Vital Organs?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
ROM people. ROM!!! (the second ROM was written in allcaps for emphasis)
You can't remotely exploit a device without a network or public interface.
We're so obsessed with connectivity and networks these days that we are blinded to the negatives of all this connectivity - thinking they are just problems of the system to be resolved rather than inherent aspects of the system which can not be gotten rid of.
Alrighty rant(off);
v Now since, like you, I love the internet and connected thingymabobs somebody please reply and give some really good counterarguments against my thinking that IP addresses+Organs is a bad idea.
Re:WIFI-Enabled Vital Organs?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
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OR you are just old and wrong.
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I wouldn't preclude being old and right.
Years of cynicism and distrust has been vindicated for many of us, because sooner or later, much of the stuff we fear could happen does.
And, if nothing else, from an engineering perspective, you at least plan for the worst from the start.
Sure, my worst case scenario might not happen. But if you at least acknowledge it's a real possibility, you might mitigate a lot of other things.
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My balls have their own /. login!
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Sphincter has posted on your wall!
Sorry about that, bro. I swear I thought it was just a fart. Still friends?
Liver has changed its relationship status to: It's complicated.
Pancreas has posted on your wall!
I swear all my boss does is sit around eating Pixie Stix and drinking Mt Dew to make my life miserable
Left Teste has posted on your wall!
So are we going to the club tonight or not?
Right Teste likes this!
Left Ear has posted on your wall!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
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I really wish I had mod points +1 parent, freakin' hilarious!!!
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What's Bob going to do with the mothers and what is he using for bait? I've got MILF, but this is a new one.
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Some people seem to be only concerned with living forever in relatively good condition, or keeping a young person alive even if the quality of life is dismal. They will give up whatever privacy, dignity, or wealth to accomplish this task. We have had some success. The average lifespan is increasing, and more imp
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Here is what scares me. We do not seem to be doing much to keep the brain healthy into very old age.
Because we have no bloody idea what to do about it. In comparison heart is simple - it has to pump blood and that's it. I would rather not put all medicine on hold until we figure out brain.
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I Here is what scares me. We do not seem to be doing much to keep the brain healthy into very old age. I have seen active, intellectually stimulated, well read, educated people fall into senility even though they have kept their mind active and engaged. It seems there is a limit to how long a brain can be very healthy. Do we want to be 125 years old and not be able to accomplish basic tasks? Do we want a world where a huge percentage of the adult population cannot care for themselves.
I've been saying this for years, after watching demented family members being kept "healthy" via maintenance drugs for years after their minds have departed. Maybe ten more years of bring dead while the body is kept alive.
It's hard for me to imagine that any presumptive Hell could be worse than sitting around in a wheelchair in a hallway somewhere, drooling, half blind and shitting in diapers, having no real idea of who I was.
But that is where most of us are heading. If we fend off heart attacks, strok
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Surely you can find a solution that doesn't involve prison time for your descendents.
A tank of argon and a cleaner bag come to mind.
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The point is not to implicate a living person. They can arrest my corpse if/when it comes to it.
Getting a tank of Argon is relatively easy and gives the relatives deniablity. I already own a MIG welder, but anybody can say they're learning to weld. (100% Argon is for Aluminum, just so you know what to ask for, 25% CO2 75% Argon would do the job just as well).
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Ok, but do want to tell the patients that they'll need to have their chest cavity cut open for a firmware update?
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I'll put it another way: Do you want to tell the patients that you didn't think the software keeping them alive through, so they'll need to have a firmware update?
Really, a heart is one freaking ancient invention. It's not something that needs new features every two months.
Unless it is to close security holes, of course. Oh, wait...
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What do you think that USB port was for? [xkcd.com]
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There's no reason they can't make it open wi-fi, connecting to any unsecured network in the vicinity and lose 100% security. You don't need layer-2 security to get layer-7 security. That, and I'd make a button in a spiderman location that would need to be pressed before WiFi or write capability were enabled, or some other physical switch to secure t
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True. On the other hand, when designing something as critical as a heart, you'd better have extremely thorough quality assurance and testing to make as sure as humanly possible that faults are discovered before you make someone's life depend on it.
While I agree that requiring open heart surgery to reach the firmware probably is taking it too far, I wouldn't like to have an artificial heart installed, where the developers have had the luxury of thinking they can always fix problems later. The assumption shou
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Because intelligence is non-atomic. (Score:2)
The goals of transhumanism require networking. Intelligence itself requires networking.
Consider: a single neuron cannot think. Thinking is the activity of a network of neurons. And furthermore, the limits on the expressive power of your thoughts are determined, in part, by the number of processing nodes (neurons) available. There are some problems that you will never be able to solve, or even visualize, with a single brain.
Yes, putting one's toaster on the internet seems to be a far cry from collaborati
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You must be from the house of Harkonnen
Where no man has gone before (Score:2)
Transhumanist medicine?
There is something wrong with that term....
Tragic technology failure ... (Score:2)
You know, I see stuff like this, and I think this is a terribly bad thing waiting to happen.
Great, your artificial heart has wi-fi. The firmware will become obsolete, or have security holes, or any number of ways in which this will be problematic.
It just seems like people build these things, when they have no real concept or experience with b
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Compared to out-of-control, control is nice; but compared to 'just fucking works' it's a thankless chore and a good opportunity to make mistakes.
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Yeah but, in this case, it didn't "just fucking work".
It stopped fucking working, so we had to fucking do something about it.
Maybe, eventually, we'll fucking figure out the fucking sensory & feedback systems, but for now, it's pretty fucking awesome that we can get fucking artificial hearts if we fucking need them.
That said, having fucking wifi connectivity in your fucking heart does sound fucking scary.
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Since there aren't enough donor organs, and those tend to have their own prob
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How could you improve the heart? It's really very reliable, self-maintaining, self-configuring, powered off readily-available biochemical energy. You can pretty much forget it's there, most of the time. Evolution has done an excellent job. The only area I can see to improve would be correcting single points of failure.
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The only class of complaint that would be nice to see addressed (not exclusive to the heart, also covers skeletal muscle, bone density, tissue healing, and assorted metabolic processes) is that most of the parameters are still tuned for a relatively high-exertion, high-risk, environment with a strong risk of at least occasional malnutrition. As your basic first-world 'press buttons at work, hired because he knows what buttons to press' type, I
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If you include non-heart things, though...
1. Fix the bloody retinas! They are back to front.
2. Why is regeneration limited to small-scale only? A lot of amputees are unhappy with this. The ability probably isn't there because there's no selective advantage in recovering from wounds which would have killed from blood loss anyway.
3. Everything that relates to aging.
4. The fat thing you said.
5. Instincts urging the consumption of calories vastly in excess to requirements.
6. The appendix. Begone!
7. Parts are no
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Compared to out-of-control, control is nice; but compared to 'just fucking works' it's a thankless chore and a good opportunity to make mistakes.
+1
Though to be fair, there are many inconveniences people will put up with to not be dead or in a hospital.
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This isn't supposed to happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article:
"French artificial heart maker Carmat says it will not perform another human implant until it has determined the cause of death of the first patient fitted with the device."
Six months later: Implanting a new heart, despite still not knowing what happened the first time."
Re:This isn't supposed to happen... (Score:5, Funny)
remember : always mount a scratch monkey (Score:5, Funny)
Only as long as the warranty (Score:2)
"From the company’s point of view, the first implantation was a success. The patient survived for 74 days within the framework of a trial where the benchmark for success was 30 days."
Something must be lost in translation here.
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Re:This isn't supposed to happen... (Score:4, Insightful)
You aren't going to make progress without experiments, some risky; but you have a population of (adult, of-sound-mind) patients who will definitely die without intervention. You don't want to act in reckless disregard for human life; but when you've got people who will definitely die and the possibility of producing improved treatments, excessive avoidance of uncertainty is disregard for human life. It's a pity that the PR flacks didn't have the guts to say that.
Pardon me but... (Score:2)
If I receive wi-fi enabled organs, will I be required to also get the horrible wi-fi logo tattooed on my forehead?
Predictable (Score:2)
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Making a heart that will keep the patient alive for years is not easy but it is likely easier than making "we'll control our hearts with our smart phones" secure. The "wifi" is only one tiny part of the huge completely out of the control of the heart maker chain of security there.
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Wifi is so totally secure:
I mean... Where would I find [wonderhowto.com] someone who knows how to crack the mighty WPA2-PSK you probably use to secure your whole network?
How could you possibly think any wireless communications are secure anywhere? *especially* blue-tooth and WiFi.
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Of course you can capture a handshake and try and bruteforce the password. But as long as said password is long enough, and even with GPU-assisted cracking, you'll die before you even go through a thousandth of the possibility space.
Security doesn't have to be perfect - if it turns out eventually that hardware advances or a flaw in the implementation makes an attack even remotely feasible, then you'll
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The comments aren't rejecting having a control. They are rejecting the suggestion of wifi, a very unappropriate choice of control channel. Several have suggested some form of NFC, which may be a choice more suited to the application.
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And of course 90% comments are whining about wifi..
The cool part will be how Comcasr integrates it into their home monitoring system.
Kids home from school? check
All the appliances working? check
Outside of the house secure? check
Grandma's Cheney Industries turboheart functiniong okay? check
Grandpa's new heart.......Damnit, he's looking at porn again! 120 bpm is too high...
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Before you go around calling people morons, you might want to learn a little about how software is horribly insecure, even when designed to be. The recent OpenSSL vulnerability is a good example.
If you think "slapping encryption, message signing, and sanity checks" is going to save you, you have a LOT to learn.
Controlling your heart with a Windows phone app? (Score:2)
Gives a new meaning to "blue screen of death".
(drops mic)
A working heart is not much (Score:2, Funny)
Even if you can fix our hearts and our telomeres and the cancer, there are all kinds of cognitive problems associated with old age - Alzheimer's and plain ol' AAMI.
So even if you can keep your 20s body into old age, at some point you'll be unable to remember things that happened recently such as whether you put your pants on this morning, and of course to check that you're wearing pants before you leave the house. Having a prime physique will make it much less horrifying for innocent bystanders, but still..
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at some point you'll be unable to remember things that happened recently such as whether you put your pants on this morning
You don't have to remember the event of putting them on. You can just quickly check if you are wearing them right now.
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At some point, your memory will be so bad that it will be a nasty surprise every time!
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Re:A working heart is not much (Score:5, Insightful)
So what is your point, really? Abandon all health care?
You do realise that there are a lot of people with excellent cognitive abilities dying of heart failure every day, and that many could have lived decades of high quality life had their hearts been healthy, right?
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Permanant vs temporary (Score:5, Insightful)
Permanence has a pretty specific meaning here. It says nothing of duration, only that it's the last.
Getting a permanent heart that lasts 76 days is not nearly as enticing as getting a temporary heart that lasts 2 years.
Comment removed (Score:3)
The first patient must have live in a cold climate (Score:2)
> That first patient, a 76-year-old man suffering from terminal heat failure, died March 2.
Re:I really don't my vital body parts to be on wif (Score:4, Funny)
I don't have any problems if it was broadcasting data, but if it's a 2-way communication (at layer 1) then they can fuck right off.
If you want to communicate, plug something in (or use near-field etc)
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Re:I really don't my vital body parts to be on wif (Score:5, Informative)
"Near Field" is a very specific thing. [wikipedia.org] Whatever you're thinking of there, certainly isn't what I'm talking about - the near field of 2.4ghz would be around 1/10 of a meter away and no further.
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with sufficiently good antennas, "no further" becomes very hard to enforce.
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I should clarify. The near field, being defined as a multiple of wavelength, is still only that far. But the signal doesn't just stop there; interception of "near field" communications from substantial distances has already been done.
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Are you able to perform the inverse though (send data to it) in a way that isn't "detectable" - specifically if it was intended for reactive near-field?
The real danger isn't so much the receipt of information as it is the ability to send data to it (commands, fuzzing, etc)
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that's a good question. How feasible is it to build a widget that can tell the difference between transit time and (remote) processing time?
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If you want to communicate, plug something in (or use near-field etc)
NFC is a misnomer.
With a sensitive enough receiver, you don't need to be "near" a NFC device to hear it talking.
With a large enough magnetic field, you don't need to be "near" a NFC device to get it talking.
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I didn't say NFC. I said Near Field. "Near Field" is a very specific thing. [wikipedia.org]
If your antenna is more distant than the near-field you are not in the near-field, but in the far-field. You can probably figure out how to communicate, I'd imagine that the real trick is synchronizing your oscillator (but this is a solved problem - radios do it all the time) but certainly any schmuck with a laptop or smartphone wouldn't be able to do it - you're going to need extra equipment.
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Good, then keep your old one working. That's an easy job.
DUAL CORE, BEEOTCHES! (Score:2)
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We can reduce the ethical problems if we neglect to clone all of the cerebral cortex and at least most of the lymbic system. The clone would then be a mindless vegetable, capable of breathing and excreting, and nothing else. There is no evil in killing a zombie, and there is no evil in making a clone start out as a zombie (whereas there would be evil in making a normal person become a zombie).
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The references are to the "Enlightened self interest" of libertarians, which has of recent times morphed into being a selfish prick who gets pissed off when the Government puts in stop signs on roads and expects him to stop at them.
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There is a basic human inclination to selfishness that is caused by instinct and reinforced by our habit of perceiving ourselves as fundamentally separated from others (Me here with World out there). There is also a basic human inclination towards generosity that comes mostly from our pack instincts and is reinforced by cultural values. Most of the arguments around enlightened self interest are motivated from these two inclinations.
I am inclined to reflect, however, that if each neuron in my brain operate
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There is a basic human inclination to selfishness that is caused by instinct and reinforced by our habit of perceiving ourselves as fundamentally separated from others (Me here with World out there). There is also a basic human inclination towards generosity that comes mostly from our pack instincts and is reinforced by cultural values.
Every once in a while here on Slashdot, Someone posts something incredibly profound. That would be what you just posted.
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woosh
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Actually, Dagny Taggart (sp?) is the heroine of "Atlas Shrugged", and Hank Reardon (sp?) is the hero.
Both are industrialists who are opposed to government subsidies for industries.
The "villains" of the story are (among others) Dagny's brother and assorted other clowns who are trying to compete in industry by getting the government to pass laws that favour them.
"John Galt" is a catchphrase throughout that book - "Who is John Galt?"
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Controlling it with a smartphone isn't going to cut it either. How often, and how quickly, does your heart rate change by more than, say, 5%? Ten times an hour? More? Do you really want to be whipping out your smartphone every couple of minutes? What if you set it wrong? What if you fat-finger yourself into a blackout
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Maybe we finally found a use for a smartwatch.
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Then how exactly you want to control it? Artificial heart won't speed up/slow down automatically in response to oxygen needs of your body because it is not controlled by nervous system. Maybe you want wired connection with plug embedded between your ribs? I don't understand why 'wifi' means 'unsecured/unauthenticated wifi' to you.
It seems that considering all the other hurdles, an internal pulse-oximeter and manometer would be an easy feature to build in. No doubt it will have some sort of feedback loop with the body, but perform better when a profile is loaded knowing what to expect (say, extended running vs extended sitting around). To your point about security, the real problem isn't that it is well designed today, but is it considered well designed still in ten years? Wifi protocols have a pretty serious history of security-b
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I want it controlled by a sensor that monitors the oxygenation level of the blood.
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Encryption, message signing ... does it ring any bells?
All of which is meaningless if the cell phone is compromised. Most indications are that, these days, even without viruses, most cell phones are already intentionally compromised straight from the factory. This really is a job for a dedicated device.
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hacker stops the hearts of 150 users of the artificial heart
No need for hackers, a bug will do it
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Because 'murder' means only and exactly what you meant it to mean when you typed it?
Jackass.
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If I sell someone a kitchen knife, and they use it to stab themselves, am I guilty of murder?
If I sell someone tobacco and tell them "smoking this causes cancer and other health problems," and they smoke it anyway, how am I guilty?
If I stop selling tobacco, someone else will. If we make it illegal to sell tobacco, then all the money (real-world economic power) will flow into the hands of the criminals who sell it anyway. And these criminals have no qualms about directly murdering people to get their way.
I
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I don't suppose the patient's last name happens to be Picard?
No, heart replacement is not what is meant by The Picard Maneuver [pinball.org] :-)
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It doesn't become a victory for transhumanism until the artificial heats are sufficiently better than the natural ones that people make the upgrade for non-medical reasons (Superior athetic ability perhaps, or because the artificial hearts with three redundant pumping systems are more reliable than the natural ones). I can't see that happening for a long time.