WirelessDoc

Study refutes claims that portable music players, such as Apple's iPod, interfere with cardiac pacemakers

This paper, "Low frequency magnetic emissions and resulting induced voltages in a pacemaker by iPod portable music players," will be published in open access journal BioMedical Engineering OnLine. It's based on a study by Howard Bassen, a researcher with the FDA, who led a research team who measured the magnetic fields produced by four different iPod models: a fourth-generation iPod and an iPod with video, and an iPod nano and iPod shuffle. They produced data refuting claims that the iPod interferes with cardiac pacemakers.

This was the claim from the authors of a highly publicized study from last year, "Pacemaker interference with an iPod,"  who concluded that "Warning labels may be needed to avoid close contact between pacemakers and iPods." They had analyzed the effect of placing the pacemaker programming head and an iPod adjacent a single patient's implanted pacemaker.[1]

This study was done because the patient had fainted which resulted in a fall and head injury and prompted the examination of suspected electromagnetic interference (EMI) by an iPod. To test this, they placed an iPod (model not specified) 2 inches above the pacemaker programming head which was placed adjacent to the patient's implanted pacemaker (supposedly on the skin of the chest wall, but the position was not specified). With this setup, they observed two types of interference in the form of oversensing by the pacemaker.

A second clinical study was done by different researchers who found "no interference for any of the eight pacemakers or the ICD (implantable cardiac defibrillator)" [2]

What Bassen did was  to first measure the magnitude and spatial distribution of magnetic fields generated near the surface of each of the four iPods using two types of sensors.  The peak magnetic field strength was 0.2 millionths of a Tesla, which is about 100x lower than  the  levels which could interfere with a  pacemaker.

Finally, he tested the interference with the pacemaker directly by putting the pacemaker case and leads in a saline filled torso simulator built to ANSI specs for the pacemaker electromagnetic compatibility standard.[3] This was his "instrumented can." This simulated a pacemaker implanted in a patients chest. In this way, they estimated the voltages these fields might produce within the protective "can" of a pacemaker.  The different iPods were place on top, to check interference via magnetic induction.

He concluded that "all iPods we studied emit very weak fields." This meets the EMC standards for active cardiac implants which require that these devices be immune to very high intensity magnetic strengths.[4]

"Based on these data, it is again concluded that it is not possible for interference to be induced in a pacemaker by the music players we tested."

References:

[1] Patel, Mehul, et al, “Pacemaker interference with an iPod”, Heart Rhythm, Volume 4, Issue 6, 2007, pp. 781-784

[2] R. Carrillo and R. Stevenson, “iPods and Pacemakers: No Clinically Significant Electromagnetic Interference”, Abstract for Heart Rhythm Society 2008 Meeting (submitted). 

[3] ANSI/AAMI PC69:2000, “Active implantable medical devices- Electromagnetic compatibility- EMC test protocols for implantable cardiac pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators”, American National Standards Institute, 2000.

[4] International Organization for Standardization (ISO), “ISO 14708- 1:2000(E), Implants for surgery - Active implantable medical devices - Part 1: General requirements for safety, marking and for information to be provided by the manufacturer”, Geneva, Switzerland, 2000.

Sony flagship model Alpha DSLR will get 24.8 megapixel CMOS full-frame sensor

Via DigitalCameraInfo.com:

Sony has revealed a few details of its forthcoming flagship model for the Alpha Digital SLR range. The as-yet unnamed model will use the 24.8 megapixel full-frame image sensor that was revealed recently and will be available by the end of 2008. Sony did not reveal any details of pricing.

I still think the Nikon will be shopping around for this or something similar for the D3x.

700MHz Block C hits reserve price: open access becomes a reality

Via Ars Technica:

After 17 rounds, the 700MHz spectrum auction has finally hit its one of its most closely watched targets: bidding on Block C has surpassed the Federal Communications Commission's mandated $4.638 billion reserve, meaning that the FCC's mandated open access rules will come into play. Bids on the block of spectrum totaled $4.744 billion after Round 17.

The auction rules require anonymous bidding, but it's speculated that among the three major players, AT&T, Verizon and Google, Google will drop out now that the reserve has been met.

Digital lifestyle: Amazon.com to Acquire Audible.com

From the Amazon PR Release:

"Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection and the broadest device compatibility in the industry," said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's senior vice president for worldwide digital media. "Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience."

They also plug the out of stock Kindle in the press release.

I've been using audiobooks to listen to John M. Barry's The Great Influenza (unabridged, just over 19 hours), Ian McEwan's Atonement, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. It was a little difficult with Gibson's work because he's invents new cyberwords and sometimes writes in sentence fragments which makes comprehension difficult. I chose to download the ebook of Cormac McCarthy's The Road for this reason.

The good thing about audiobooks is that you can listen while during your entire commute without interruption, and it's great for a long walk in the city. The really bad thing is that you can't bookmark or navigate to a specific chapter. This works for fiction, but for a science book that you want to use for future reference, it's a real pain.

Mobipocket is great for reading ebooks on your smartphone. You can annotate, bookmark, even draw pictures with their free reader. I've even put chapters of Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment 2008 on my Treo 700p using the desktop Mobipocket software. You lose the illustrations, charts and graphs, but having the text on hand that you can bookmark works for me. It also loads the texts onto the SD card, so can carry many books without clogging up the phone's internal memory.

Panel faults FDA for inadequate IT and staffing

 From Government Executive:

The Food and Drug Administration faces shortfalls in staffing and information technology, which have resulted "in a plethora of inadequacies that threaten our society," according to a report by the agency's Science Board.

"Free Public Wi-Fi" is Microsoft Windows Silent Adhoc Network Advertisement crying wolf

The puzzling phenomenon of seeing "Free Public Wi-Fi" that you can't connect to when you're searching for free public wi-fi has been solved. It's "Microsoft Windows Silent Adhoc Network Advertisement."

From a Nomad Research Centre Advisory:

This advisory documents an anomaly involving Microsoft's Wireless Network Connection. If a laptop connects to an ad-hoc network it can later start beaconing the ad-hoc network's SSID as its own ad-hoc network without the laptop owner's knowledge. This can allow an attacker to attach to the laptop as a prelude to further attack.

Basically, what's going on with "Free Public Wi-Fi" is that when you connect to a network with an SSID such as "Free Public Wi-Fi," your Windows computer retains that SSID. But the glitch is that it also will broadcast this SSID inviting other computers within range to connect with your computer in an ad hoc network. The ad hoc network only allows the other computer to connect to your computer, which you most probably don't want to offer. When you're looking for a Wi-Fi connection, you're looking for an access point which will connect you to the Internet.

Of course, when other users see the "Free Public Wi-Fi," they naturally want to connect to such a fetching SSID, and voila, they've got it in their system, and they'll be broadcasting it to others eventually. In reality, no one is connecting to the Internet via this SSID, but it is still being spread in a viral fashion in the connected world of laptops.

Somewhere there is a hot spot where you can connect with the SSID "Free Public Wi-Fi" that started all this going. Who knows where?

Some enterprising marketer might use this bug to create a viral campaign using the SSID "Miller Lite beer, less filling, free public wi-fi" and spread to message to countless road warriors who then spread it throughout the Wi-Fi laptop universe.

Multitouch is spreading to more devices

Uncle Walt says so.

This is the interface introduced with the Apple iPhone, then carried over to the iPod Touch. If you're not a gadget person, you might not realize that this is not the traditional touch screen used on what we called PDAs in the olden times, but it's that feature where you can flick, swipe and squeeze your finger tips on screen to navigate or resize an image.

It's now appearing on the the touchpad of the MacBookAir, and according to Mossberg, another company, Synaptics will use something similar for the touchpads it produces for laptop manufacturers.

And, you have the companies such as HTC who are making cell phones with a Multitouch-like capability to  ride on the coattails of the iPhones popularity.

Sigma announces DP1 for this spring

Via DPReview.com

This opens the possibility that the other major digital camera manufacturers will produce something similar. Many folks with DSLR systems want a compact camera that can shoot raw and hold up well under low light conditions.

This has a fixed focal length                 16.6mm F4 (28mm equiv.) lens which is probably the best focal length for the majority of situations.

It might even dissuade a quite a few people from buying a DSLR, which although offering the ability to change lenses, most time you don't want to carry around all that weight.

Superlative MacWorld '08 software product uses the Nuance speech recognition engine

Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Net News fame is reporting that he was "suitably impressed" with the new MacSpeech Dictate (scroll down to Most Welcome Brain Transplant) speech recognition software demo'ed under the noisy conditions present at the recent MacWorld 08 Expo. Turns out, this "superlative product" uses the Nuance Communications engine which drives the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 software that the Windows users have been using for a while now. I was using it satisfactorily with 1.5 GB of RAM on my PC. It is amazing how you can get by with very little time spent training the software.

I would advise using more than 2 GB of RAM, since I did have problems dictating in memory intensive apps like MS Word. Plus, you really have to be careful with the cadence of your dictating, pronouncing each word consistently, and using complete phrases. If you don't, you'll find yourself constantly saying "scratch that," the command for "delete that nonsensical chatter I've been blathering." With a laptop, you might also have to invest in an external sound processor to make it work well.

The software tunes itself to your voice using the headset that comes with the software. Forget about thinking you can transcribe a recorded conversation between two people, although there are portable voice recorders that supposedly doing a good job of transcribing once you get back to your PC.

Pogue of the NY Times gives the background on the deal, along with the usual hammy video he's famous for. Now, if they could only get this to work with a smartphone.

The MacSpeech Dictate Web site.

"Windows Vista Annoyances" by O'Reilly press

The good news is that this book by David A. Karp will walk you through solutions for the most common problems encountered with Windows Vista. The bad: for the most part, you have to fool with the registry.

Good luck, and tread carefully.