Gordaen’s Blog

Sometimes you read a headline and know that the story is going to be perfect blog material; it can be so good that you don’t even have to read the article. The advantage to actually reading it, or at least skimming it, is that you can pick out huge chunks of text to quote in order to make it look like you did more work. The article that caught my eye this morning was Study: iPods able to crash pacemakers.

Having quite a bit of experience with electronics, I instantly think, “iPods use very little power and don’t use electromagnetic fields for transmission, this is bogus. Any pacemaker has to be made with enough shielding to prevent interference from such a device…” And yes, my thoughts to contain ellipses.

This isn’t a site I read regularly (it just popped up on my “iGoogle” page), so I was not sure how believable it would be. Then I saw ads that interfered with the content and knew it couldn’t be too reliable. After that, I read this paragraph:

More pointedly, according to a study carried out by Jay Thaker, a 17-year-old high school student, which was presented to a selection of heart specialists yesterday, close proximity to an iPod can trigger monitoring malfunctions in cardiac pacemakers due to electromagnetic interference.

I figure the student must be intelligent enough to know that such claims without data would be enough to give him the .2 seconds of fame that it takes for me to forget his name, so maybe he did some real work. And then I read this gem:

The study was conducted at the Thoracic and Cardiovascular Institute at Michigan State University across 100 patients with an average age of 77, all equipped with implanted pacemaker devices. Thaker’s somewhat worrying results (which only focused on the iPod, and not the effects of other digital portable music players), were presented on Thursday at the annual meeting off the Heart Rhythm Society in Denver, Colorado.

“Uh, yeah, I’d like to do a study to see if I can make your life-saving device fail. Sign here if you don’t want to partake in this potentially deadly study. What’s that? You aren’t very mobile? Well, I guess you can’t sign the ‘Please do not kill me’ form.” Pacemakers basically monitor the heart’s natural electrical rhythm and give the heart a jolt when the rhythm fails. Obviously, they’re much more complex than that, so I would think that they would have at least some shielding to prevent interference. Of course, I think logically, which is always wrong.

I just wonder about the person whose pacemaker failed because of the study. Does he have to have an operation to have a new one installed? Will his new one regulate his heart and play music? Will it regulate his heart to the beat of the music he is listening to? If so, can he listen to music with a fast beat when he is excited and Enya when he is ready to die?