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

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.

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.

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

[johnny cashed]

Pop your undies in the microwave for ten seconds and they won't be reporting back to the mothership, don't worry.

But it is what's in my undies that concerns me...

on another tangent...

But how do I know that my microwave doesn't have an RFID reader that enables it to know that there is an RFID tag inside and it only goes through the motions of microwaving my undies, thereby rendering any RFID chip(s) in my undies untouched and fully functional? Far fetched? Future microwave dinners and popcorn might have RFID tags embedded which tell various microwave oven how long to cook the product. Can I get thicker tinfoil for my hat?

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.

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: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.