Phones containing magnets inhibit implantable cardioverter defibrillators
bhrs.com
bhrs.com
I use an iPhone 12Pro. The advice I was given was don't hold any phone closer than six inches away from the device- so holding it to my right ear is fine. Mag fields right next to the device can stop it sensing or in rare circumstances can cause a factory reset.
The biggest EM hazards in my house are the induction hobs on my cooker - these are worse than the phone. On full power I have to keep at least 60cm away from them or they will blind / alarm the ICD. So I am more concerned about them than the phone.
[Edit] Other hazards are drills held close to my chest and even the capes used by hair-dressers that have magnetic clasps to stay shut. Standing right next to the speakers at a concert is also not-advised.
Was going to say induction hobs - that's a huge one, especially as gas is eventually phased out and they become the defacto hob type.
NHS recommendation[1] is, as you said, 6 inches for most mobile phones, but no special callout for the 12.
Apple goes further[2] and says 12 inches when wirelessly charging, which also makes sense.
[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pacemaker-implantation/recover... [2] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211900
Thank you! I'm just 60 and was (I believed) in good health. My VF episode was a glitch in my heart's conduction cycle, and the various tests I received show that my heart is physically healthy. So I feel 'perfectly okay' apart the almost dying thing. My biggest health issue now is the cracked risks from the superbly enthusiastic CPR I received, but the pain from coughing and moving awkwardly is a small price to pay.
"ah, you'll be fine" seriously?
Think of the likely user who has a pacemaker. They are probably a man, he's probably in his 60s, 70s, or 80s. He's likely not all that familiar with the intricacies of modern phones. His kids probably convinced him to get a phone so he could stay in touch more easily. That's the audience we're talking about here.
It'll happen a lot and while it's happening the lifesaving device is fully disabled. That's a big deal.
(Which is inaccurate, of course, since it sounds from the article like disabling a pacemaker in this way will only open up an opportunity for your heart to fail.)
I’m also over fifty, overweight, and am more likely than average to need a pacemaker or similar device within the next few years.
I hadn’t considered the iPhone 12 problem until now, after it has been explained to me. Yikes!
So a problem of phone calls disconnecting reminds you of phones causing cardiac problems with people using pacemakers?
Kinda worth making some drama about it, no?
Note it, inform people about it, mitigate the effects where possible and research ways to eliminate the issue entirely. But it's not exactly an emergency by any reasonable definition and the pearl-clutching "drama" is a bit much.
It is a responsibility of the designers of the medical devices to assure they are safe. Furthermore they naturally have to be replaced every few years, so it isn't even hard to phase out the outdated design in a coordinated fashion. But I guess this costs money and it is cheaper to blame others.
For what it's worth I think it's still up to the user to be safe and know what they can and cannot have up against their chest. But to say that the medical community can just be "agile" about this is to really misunderstand how those devices are certified and designed.
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
Also, it is a big deal to redesign an implanted medical device, as it should be. These are not tongue depressors. ICDs are the most tightly regulated device the FDA reviews.
My father had a pacemaker, and for long enough to receive a battery swap. The battery for that particular model was implanted under his shoulder blade; the swap-out was performed under local anaesthetic.
The original implantation was a bit more complex from a surgical perspective, requiring keyhole surgery and an angioplasty to run the wire around his heart as well as to implant the battery and controller. But the point is: these devices can be installed and expected to perform for decades, so the engineering design is of necessity highly conservative and has long-term maintenance in mind. It's also safety-critical: if the device malfunctions, people can die.
PS: a pacemaker is not an implanted defibrillator. (Also, my father died in 2017, so what I'm describing is probably a decade or two behind the state of the art.)
If Apple were two guys in a garage, you could forgive them. But a trillion dollar company... not so much.
Image if a simple magnet could be used to start your car or to unlock your front door.
That a cheap keyfob has more embedded security that a piece of life-giving medical equipment is just unbelievable.
As you have said, powerful magnets have been common in private homes for 50 years.
There's no way this is Apples fault.
1. https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/cell-phones/...
They only measure dynamic magnetic fields (i.e. electromagnetic fields). There are essentially no regulatory limits in static fields, since they don't really interfere with RF signals.
In fact, is amazingly easy to purchase neodymium magnets of a size that should not be that easily available, which explains the hilarious safety videos like this one[1]
The video is very well done (for a semi-pro it seems?), it's one of those things where people (including me) might think "oh yeah magnets, I know about those" but you actually don't, or at last not at the scale that you might need.
That reminds me of this LPL video about Gallium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeghGhVdt9s where you might think: oh yeah, metals, those are sturdy blocks that you need to weld or saw.
Unless I'm mistaken this is what's happening:
1. ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).
2.However, this is not trivial since a human body is a bag of salt water. Therefore low frequencies are needed.
3. Low frequencies are very difficult at the necessary length scales with electric fields, so they used the magnetic field instead.
So far, so good. But then they assumed that the person would never be next to a magnet? That's a design flaw on their end, not the iPhone's. There's magnets, and low moving large currents, everywhere!
The should have implemented a primitive type of port knocking.
The actual problem is that EM fields blind the device so that they can't sense the cardiac arrhythmias they are designed to fix, this rendering them useless.
> ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).
My St Jude Ellipse ICD communicates bidirectionally (control inputs in, telemetry out).
That being said, the article (TL/DR) appears to focus on "static" magnetic fields. The near field charging feature of the iPhone barely makes mention.
I think the "disable ICD" being a simple magnetized reed switch for an implantable medical device is a bit silly. At least tap a code into that reed switch a little!
All I'm saying from that is while a lot of comments around here are calling it design flaws, I'm pretty sure to a certain extent its a design decision. If you have a patient on the stretcher and you need to disable that thing now then a magnet seems like a perfectly reasonable & safe thing to use. Requiring specialized devices that might not be available at all times seems like the design flaw. Asking patients with specific health needs to avoid certain activities/devices is not a huge stretch.
My device sends data to a base station which reports back and is also interrogated every 6 months by a electrophysiologist and they can see if and when it has been disabled.
Mine has been disabled twice so far, once by using the Boston Scientific interrogation device to turn it off, and once by a surgeon taping a magnet to my chest!
There must be a point at which a magnet of power n causes a negative effect that increases along with n, time, and exponentially with proximity?
(Seriously though, there are research magnets powerful enough to levitate plastic that people have jammed their hands into with no ill effects. It seems that across a wide range of intensities at least, the human body just does not care. This is, perhaps, surprising given how much electrochemical activity is necessary for continued homeostasis, but it appears to be observationally true).
[1] https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic-levit...
Deserves its own post.
Working in certain environments (IIRC >2T) requires special training, that include things like "slow walking", since moving too fast would induce currents in the brain that could knock you out.
For a product that I worked in we had to find a cheap way to create a 2T static field for validation, the complications of each of the possibilities were amazing.
In a brief search, I found this strange and interesting article from 1983, regarding experiments conducted at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California:
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/22/science/do-enormous-magne...
TL;DR - there were detectable effects on heart function, eye function and possibly sense of direction. The effects were deemed safe at the levels studied.
Here is the study the article appears to be about (on page 86, as numbered in the scan):
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
Going by its closing remarks, it appears this was an active field of research at the time.
I keep my phone in my pocket but I think some people may be hesitant to keep their phone in the pocket for concerns about radiation from the phone in proximity to their testicles.
And there may be something to it. In particular if you keep your phone in your pocket while using hands free and having conversations on the phone. https://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-reproduction/news/2008...