RFID Tags Can Interfere With Medical Devices

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."

Comments

This is too much

[Mensa Babe]

The radio frequency identification, or RFID, is an inherently flawed idea. It is a technological solution to a social problem that it created. It is a threat to our security, our privacy, our freedom, 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 and even Richard Stallman. My only question is, how much more insult to our intelligence can we take as a society before we start actively protesting? Our freedom, our privacy, our health and our dignity is being taken from us and all we can do is complain on the Internet? Where are the protesting groups? Where are the outraged people desperate to change the situation? Where are the angry mobs? What else are we going to let them take away from us before we stop talking and start acting?

Re:This is too much

[Anonymous Coward]

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'll simply point out that I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic for this particular issue, but when it comes to taking action against this here I'll be more then happy to do my part.

Re:This is too much

[FooAtWFU]

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.

Re:This is too much

[SomeJoel]

Are you suggesting that because of some perceived misuse of the technology, we should protest its existence? RFID readers are used in some semiconductor manufacturing fabs to track carriers (and hence wafers). These allow for faster and easier reading than other tracking devices, such as barcode readers. This generally make an automated fab run more smoothly, and increases throughput. I don't think this particular use violates your security, privacy, or freedom.

Re:This is too much

[Awptimus Prime]

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.

Interference in medicine

[neapolitan]

Interesting -- Slashdot has talked about this kind of thing before and I remember responding:

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234315&cid=19078365

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...

Hazardous

[electricbern]

I dub thee harzardous technology of the week. You can now join the cellphone, TV, radio, power grid, Internet, and so on in the list of hazardous technology. Welcome on board.

Oh, please

[spun]

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:

Progress in gel batteries could result in RFIDs readable from 300 feet. If one of them is inserted in something you carry, you could be scanned from a block away! Total monitoring of everyone's movements could be a reality. Gosh, that could never happen with any other kind of technology, oh wait, spies have been doing that for years, and tracking people over a much longer distance. How would protesting RFID change that, exactly? There are much, much scarier things to protest against than RFID tags, get some perspective please.

Re:Oh, please

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, just stick an AOL CD in there with it. If the AOL CD is disabled, then so is your underwear. ;)

-Huck

Re:Oh, please

[KGIII]

Err... Don't the RFID tags actually, you know, just exist? They don't acquire new data (such as where you've been) I don't think? If they did then I got my information mixed up which isn't entirely unlikely. But, assuming that they contain only the picture of you (and perhaps your country of origin) then wouldn't the person in the hotel lobby just get, you know, a picture of you (which they'd already seen you and stuffs) and your country of origin which, well, is probably something they could figure out pretty easily by listening to your accent? It seems like a rather silly way to spend your money when you can likely just ask the average (non-spy) tourist, "Hey, where are you from?" They'll probably happily tell you. Add to that a cell phone and, well, you get their picture too. But, maybe I'm getting the technology wrong... They call 'em RFID readers, not RFID R/Ws so I'm pretty sure they just store the above mentioned static data.

FUD and title errors

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

The headline is wrong, as usual.

[John Hasler]

The interference came from the readers not the tags. The tags are passive.

Pros and cons

[EmbeddedJanitor]

First off, lets be pedantic. RFID tags are passive (well slightly active while transponding) and don't cause problems just sitting there. It is the readers that cause the problems.

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 with equipment.

Medical devices should be designed to be highly robust to EM interference, but the flip side to that is that often the sensors need to be very sensitive to detect slight electrical signals in the body (pulse, brain activity etc). Still, it should be possible to design equipment that is not degraded by RFID readers.

Safety Recalls Needed

[John Hasler]

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.

Re:Safety Recalls Needed

[CodeBuster]

Isn't this why the FCC here in the United States classifies different electronic devices according to whether or not they can emit or must accept radio frequency interference from outside sources? Perhaps the medical device manufacturers have a more critical classification where they have the "right" not to be interfered with (unlike say, your iPod which must accept any outside interference and generate none of its own) and designed their systems around this assumption of legal protection by device classifications?

Re:Well???

[Creepy Crawler]

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.