Why People with Brain Implants Are Afraid to Go Through Automatic Doors
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
> He thinks the theft-prevention system interfered with his implant and turned it off.
This makes far more sense as a possible cause of interference than a motion detector and motor.
On a related note, here's an interesting and informative video from Applied Science on how these tags work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAm7qAKAXwI
Cable tracing probes are not only good at picking up signals from the trace transmitter, they also amplify other types of EMF. You can hear a ton of noise from a keyboard as it goes through the scan loops. LCDs squeal at their refresh frequency. Automatic door detectors make a ton of noise too.
I'm not sure how close you'd have to be to the detector you'd have to be, but if the resonant frequency matched and you're tall enough to nearly make contact maybe it's a factor here.
"To test such situations, he uses a detector that tells him the frequency of things like security systems to make sure they’re operating on a different frequency than his device. If the frequency is a match, he asks to go around."
Also, the statistical power of these results are quite strong. (Sometimes I think people screw up in teaching the "scientific method" as the traditional presentation tends to assume that you are dealing with some effect where you don't have a lot of statistical power, so people get this idea that you must have massive samples and do complicated statistics. This is not true. There are time you are justified in drawing strong conclusions from very small sets of data, because the statistical power is sufficient to justify it. You know this, because you do it all the time.)
And finally, this absolutely conforms with all current understandings of mainstream science and engineering. Massive amounts of engineering effort in the radio world are spent preventing, dealing with, and in some military type applications, causing radio interference. We're not talking about claims that UFOs are giving this guy Parkinson's, we're talking about perfectly sensible straightforward theories that were by far the dominant theory that an informed person would think of even before the overwhelming evidence that it is EM based.
Am I misunderstanding this, or do these devices not do even the most rudimentary false-input rejection? EMI is one thing, but it sounds more like their radio is accepting random noise as valid commands.
(Neighbor comment[1] suggests those devices don't have anything like firmware upgrades, so don't see why they need an actual receiver)
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I'll fully admit I'm speculating. It just seems odd.
Shielding around these thin wires can be impractical in many situations due to the limited space afforded by the brain and skull.
To reprogram a pacemaker, you needed first to activate a reed switch with a magnet, then transmit the right commands, properly encrypted and with their matching checksums.
Parameters could of course not be set outside of safe bounds and in case of software failure there was a safe default mode that was running on dedicated hardware.
Either there are some really dumb companies developing active implants out there, or the article and allegations are sensationalistic conjectures.
Edit: I don't know much about brain implants, maybe induced currents in the electrode are enough to trigger some kind of seizure. This scenario may be possible. For a pacemaker though, I doubt that it would be possible to trigger a single extrasystole with normal electric or RF devices.
It wouldn't fix any of the other many possible failure modes, the sum total of which strikes me as much more likely to be the issue. Electronics can get weird.
These isn't a lot you can do about this sort of problem. The electrode used to stimulate is the main entry point for RF interference and you can't shield it for 3 reasons.
1)It adds size. You are effectively stabbing yourself in the brain with a coat hanger. Smaller is inherently better.
2)It adds mass. The difference in mass between a brain implant and your brain itself leads to brain damage in high kinetic situations like car accidents due to the different rates of acceleration.
3)Shielding an electrical stimulator prevents it from electrically stimulating thus defeating the purpose of the implant in the first place.
What you probably need is a robust RF limiting front end to protect the device from unintended signals which is a major design challenge depending on the nature of the stimulating signal and permissible heating.
Sorry, could not resist: MC Parkinson in the house yo, with bling on his mind.
Seriously, wearing a hat indoors is a strong cultural taboo in some regions.
It's hard to know without testing, but blocking this could require quite a lot of headgear. Way easier to build something that can take it better.
I know if someone's opened up my skull. I assume everyone has some sort of multi-band wireless transceiver in their pocket, because that's a cell phone.
I could be wrong, but if that's how it is - well, it's not trivial to shield a needle to prevent it acting as an antenna.
Would be great if someone who knows this stuff can tell us how it really is.
You only need to shield the exposed parts.
The newer ones use bluetooth so hopefully less susceptible. But yeah, have had case reports of refridgerator doors, mall security, TSA agents overzealous w/ their wands, and one instance w/ a Prius, etc. There is a gizmo they get that they can put up to their device and turn it back on; that being said, a lot of ppl have lost theirs, or have let the AAA batteries in them run out...
EDIT: Hi downvoters! Is it common knowledge that they are afraid of automatic doors? This is the first I’ve heard of such fears. I know maybe two people with brain implants and they’ve never mentioned it. The article claims this is true, but it claims a lot of things without a lot of data.