PROTECTING PACEMAKERS FROM INTERFERENCE.

• Position: Electronic interference - Brief Article

As electronic components become smaller and smarter, they allow development of increasingly sophisticated pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, and other medical devices that have improved life for more than a million people worldwide. Meanwhile, growing concern about theft from retail stores has led to widespread use of electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems that generate fields of electromagnetic energy which can interfere with operation of the sensitive medical devices, causing concern for some store customers using pacemakers or implantable defibrillators.

Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Atlanta, are working with manufacturers of this equipment to understand--and therefore help prevent--potentially harmful interactions. In the test center, senior research engineer Jimmy A. Woody and research engineer Ralph M. Herkert subject pacemakers, defibrillators, and other devices to the energy fields created by a representative sample of eight electronic article surveillance systems and two EAS system tag deactivators provided by their manufacturers. Using standardized test procedures, they measure how the medical devices respond through their full range of operation. The resulting data is used by the manufacturers' design and quality assurance departments to improve their products, if...