Health informatics. Use of mobile wireless communication and computing technology in healthcare facilities. Recommendations for electromagnetic compatibility (management of unintentional electromagnetic interference) with medical devices

2007 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ting-Wei Wang ◽  
Ting-Tse Lin

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) in biomedical applications is a significant issue related to the user’s life safety, especially in implantable medical devices. Cardiovascular diseases and neurodegenerative disorders are the main chronic disease worldwide that rely on implantable treatment devices such as cardiac pacemakers and vagus nerve stimulators. Both devices must have high EMC to avoid electromagnetic interference-induced health risks, even death during the treatment. Thus, it is important to understand how EMI can affect implantable devices and proactively protect devices from electromagnetic interference, providing reliable and safe implantable device therapy. To this end, this chapter comprehensively introduces the clinical issues and provides EMC requirements for the implantable device such as a cardiac pacemaker and vagus nerve stimulator. The significance of this chapter is to present the EMC important issues in medical engineering that can help to evolve reliable and secure implantable device development in the future.


Author(s):  
Mingxue Liao

AbstractWith the development and wide applications of wireless communication technology, the limited spectrum resources and the fixed spectrum allocation policy could no longer satisfy the demand for wireless communication. Just for this reason, many spectrum resources become spectrum holes because they are allocated but not used. Cognitive radio is now becoming one of the most important techniques for high utility of these spectrum holes. If the holes available to cognitive users are abundant over a certain time, it is a worth consideration to increase network throughputs by orthogonal multiplexing as many as spectrum holes. A multi-transceiver configuration is one of the possible solutions for this purpose. With such a schema, all transceivers within a cognitive user work in a concurrent or parallel mode, by which the throughput of the network can be increased. However, co-site working cognitive radios may incur electromagnetic interference between each other. When more cognitive radios are equipped, much electromagnetic interference may be incurred. Many techniques are proposed to mitigate such so-siting interference; however, none of them have addressed the probability that the interference will happen. If the probability could be estimated in advance, the user will make a better planning on the configurations of the co-siting working radios. Based on an elaborated n-fold multiple integral model, we propose a novel method to decide how many cognitive radios can be installed for one cognitive user at most. This is our main contribution with this work, providing an enhanced ability to determine the optimal number of cognitive radios installed within each cognitive user. We make a strict deduction on electromagnetic compatibility probability with various parameters of cognitive radios. Simulations are performed and the results show that the electromagnetic compatibility of the simulated cognitive radio system meets the deducted probability by this method very well.


Volume 3 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Bozec ◽  
Martin Robinson ◽  
Dave Pearce ◽  
Chris Marshmann

In recent years, advancements in the field of wireless communications have led to a proliferation of devices emitting and receiving radio frequencies in the 2.4-gigahertz (GHz) frequency region, also known as the 2.4GHz unlicensed Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band. These recent advances in wireless technology such as Wireless Local Area Network (WLANs) (e.g. 802.11 (Wi-Fi), Wireless Person Area Networks (WPANs) including short-range wireless systems such as Bluetooth, and wireless telemetry equipment for patient monitoring, offer great opportunities for more advanced, efficient and cost effective communications in healthcare facilities. However, the popularity of such devices has the potential to lead to electromagnetic interference (EMI) between electronic transmitting devices and medical equipment, and to disruption in essential communications caused by interference from other devices using the increasingly overloaded ISM band. Problems occur since the EMI could lead to subtle malfunctions of medical equipment that might go undetected for long period. Most importantly, such EMI has the potential to cause malfunction that could impact upon patient safety.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth J Seidman ◽  
Wolfgang Kainz ◽  
Jon Casamento ◽  
Donald Witters

This paper presents results of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing of three implantable neurostimulators exposed to the magnetic fields emitted from several walk-through and hand-held metal detectors. The motivation behind this testing comes from numerous adverse event reports involving active implantable medical devices (AIMDs) and security systems that have been received by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). EMC testing was performed using three neurostimulators exposed to the emissions from 12 walk-through metal detectors (WTMDs) and 32 hand-held metal detectors (HHMDs). Emission measurements were performed on all HHMDs and WTMDs and summary data is presented. Results from the EMC testing indicate possible electromagnetic interference (EMI) between one of the neurostimulators and one WTMD and indicate that EMI between the three neurostimulators and HHMDs is unlikely. The results suggest that worst case situations for EMC testing are hard to predict and testing all major medical device modes and setting parameters are necessary to understand and characterize the EMC of AIMDs.


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