My company produces brain implants. Technically you can upgrade the firmware wirelessly (we do this in testing all the time) but nobody wants to take the responsibility for doing that with patients. With more RAM available I think wireless upgrade will be the standard in a few years.
For a wireless update you need to be able to store the new firmware in a temp area, verify it and then activate it. Old devices don't have enough memory but that's changing. Also, most new firmware needs new hardware features so this capability may not be that useful in practice.
It's more than liability, reducing physical access requirements opens up a much larger attack surface.
I know if someone's opened up my skull. I assume everyone has some sort of multi-band wireless transceiver in their pocket, because that's a cell phone.
I don't know the details but the biggest problem seems to be the interaction of the pulse generator with the leads. You can't shield that away. It's more complex.
Wireless updates obviously have major security issues, but I wonder if there's a compromise that doesn't require surgery. Induction, perhaps? Updates transmitted through a wired induction pad pressed against the skin above the device?
I think (I'm really no expert on this stuff) I've read that device itself is located just below the skull, but is connected to a relatively long and very thin electrodes (or electrode arrays) that go deep inside the brain matter.
I could be wrong, but if that's how it is - well, it's not trivial to shield a needle to prevent it acting as an antenna.
Would be great if someone who knows this stuff can tell us how it really is.
It's possible that better shielding on the device would be more of a curse than a blessing. It would increase device size, and possibly cause absorption of the waves that would heat it - leading to serious brain damage.
Sure, but what would act as the stable ground for the shielding? You need to avoid anything physical crossing the skin/skull/etc. to avoid cleanliness issues, remember.
Well you could probably disguise it inside of one of those driver caps, and I would think a copper mesh might be better... Though depending on the source of the interference a full head (ski)mask-like hat might be required.
Well, that would be more like a Faraday cage (and of course it already exists as a Commercial product).
Google for "Balaclava Shield", you will find exactly what you described.
The theft prevention systems use inductive power to activate the security tags. If this matches the resonant frequency of an implant you could be in trouble.
Yeah, automatic doors are generally infra-red or ultrasonic though some of them can spew out a bunch of nasty EMF.
Cable tracing probes are not only good at picking up signals from the trace transmitter, they also amplify other types of EMF. You can hear a ton of noise from a keyboard as it goes through the scan loops. LCDs squeal at their refresh frequency. Automatic door detectors make a ton of noise too.
I'm not sure how close you'd have to be to the detector you'd have to be, but if the resonant frequency matched and you're tall enough to nearly make contact maybe it's a factor here.
Serious question: Could a user of such a device, wear some sort of protective hat for situations like this? Since you can't really fully predict where interference can occur, and otherwise avoiding it could cause you not to be able to have anything resembling a normal life.
that looks like a nice way to concentrate all the rf radiation right in the center of your brain, doesn't this ricochet all the rf that enters from below the hat?
You probably wouldn't need a hat. Neurostimulators made by Medtronic, the part that outputs the therapy and listens for input, are actually implanted in the chest or stomach area. The actual brain implant is just a thin wire that connects to the stimulator.
It may be possible, but it's more complicated that you might think. It seems the original source is gone, but when some MIT students actually measured the effectiveness of tin foil hats, they could end up amplifying some frequencies: http://boingboing.net/2012/10/01/tinfoil-hats-actually-ampli...
It's hard to know without testing, but blocking this could require quite a lot of headgear. Way easier to build something that can take it better.
The article is about someone whose brain implant failed, and concludes that the problem was caused by electromagnetic interference. But this is pure guesswork; no measurements were taken, no tests were performed and no electrical engineers were consulted.
> I go to a support group for people with deep brain stimulation implants and I gave a talk about interference. I asked how many people had an experience like mine at Best Buy and all 50 people put their hands up.
I'd be extremely hesitant to perform detailed testing, too, if part of the system under test happened to be installed inside my actual skull. It's not wrong to say that further investigation is warranted, but to discount the present result entirely because it has yet to be closely characterized strikes me as cavalier in the extreme.
"Olhoeft is a retired professor of geophysics in Colorado who taught courses on electromagnetism, so with those two details, it wasn’t hard for him to figure out what had probably gone wrong. His implant, he says, operated at the same electromagnetic frequency as Best Buy’s theft detection system, and the two signals interfered with each other."
"To test such situations, he uses a detector that tells him the frequency of things like security systems to make sure they’re operating on a different frequency than his device. If the frequency is a match, he asks to go around."
Also, the statistical power of these results are quite strong. (Sometimes I think people screw up in teaching the "scientific method" as the traditional presentation tends to assume that you are dealing with some effect where you don't have a lot of statistical power, so people get this idea that you must have massive samples and do complicated statistics. This is not true. There are time you are justified in drawing strong conclusions from very small sets of data, because the statistical power is sufficient to justify it. You know this, because you do it all the time.)
And finally, this absolutely conforms with all current understandings of mainstream science and engineering. Massive amounts of engineering effort in the radio world are spent preventing, dealing with, and in some military type applications, causing radio interference. We're not talking about claims that UFOs are giving this guy Parkinson's, we're talking about perfectly sensible straightforward theories that were by far the dominant theory that an informed person would think of even before the overwhelming evidence that it is EM based.
Sample size is too small and correlation does not equal causation are the worst. Teachers did a great job teaching those things, but sometimes correlation does equal causation or at the very least is interesting enough to warrant a closer look rather than to be dismissed so easily. At the same time, a sample size of one is good enough to prove something in a scientific way. If I claim to know the lottery numbers, I can prove it by winning the next lottery. In doing so I beat 1 to 5 million odds, which are greater than the 1 in twenty that most studies require.
FTA: In its manuals, Medtronic, the maker of the device, clearly advises patients that things like hairdryers, cell phones, power tools, and yes, in-store security systems may impact devices.
Encryption was mentioned as a possible fix, which made me go WTF.
Am I misunderstanding this, or do these devices not do even the most rudimentary false-input rejection? EMI is one thing, but it sounds more like their radio is accepting random noise as valid commands.
Uh. I thought it was all about parasitic currents. Strong enough EM fields induce those in the wires, brain gets stimulation and goes into seizure, this sort of stuff.
(Neighbor comment[1] suggests those devices don't have anything like firmware upgrades, so don't see why they need an actual receiver)
That would be the obvious interpretation, yes. Induced currents from EMI can be dangerous, and implants don't necessarily have the luxury of shielding, but if that was why... then how would encryption help?
I'll fully admit I'm speculating. It just seems odd.
You don't need to intentionally create a radio receiver to inadvertently pick up EMI. Simple thin wires will end up with this same parasitic current problem, by nature of their shape and composition.
Shielding around these thin wires can be impractical in many situations due to the limited space afforded by the brain and skull.
I worked on pacemaker firmware about 15 years ago. Even back then, this kind a scenario would have been very improbable.
To reprogram a pacemaker, you needed first to activate a reed switch with a magnet, then transmit the right commands, properly encrypted and with their matching checksums.
Parameters could of course not be set outside of safe bounds and in case of software failure there was a safe default mode that was running on dedicated hardware.
Either there are some really dumb companies developing active implants out there, or the article and allegations are sensationalistic conjectures.
Edit: I don't know much about brain implants, maybe induced currents in the electrode are enough to trigger some kind of seizure. This scenario may be possible. For a pacemaker though, I doubt that it would be possible to trigger a single extrasystole with normal electric or RF devices.
Encryption would fix it if the device was misinterpreting ambient EM as commands. If the device is this poorly designed I'd suggest that a lawsuit could be filed.
It wouldn't fix any of the other many possible failure modes, the sum total of which strikes me as much more likely to be the issue. Electronics can get weird.
To me it sounds more like the device received too much current on it's driver circuit and shut down to prevent damage to the device which is exactly what an implant should do since shutting down just means a trip to your doctor to get it (wirelessly) turned back on as opposed to dangerous and costly brain surgery to replace it.
These isn't a lot you can do about this sort of problem. The electrode used to stimulate is the main entry point for RF interference and you can't shield it for 3 reasons.
1)It adds size. You are effectively stabbing yourself in the brain with a coat hanger. Smaller is inherently better.
2)It adds mass. The difference in mass between a brain implant and your brain itself leads to brain damage in high kinetic situations like car accidents due to the different rates of acceleration.
3)Shielding an electrical stimulator prevents it from electrically stimulating thus defeating the purpose of the implant in the first place.
What you probably need is a robust RF limiting front end to protect the device from unintended signals which is a major design challenge depending on the nature of the stimulating signal and permissible heating.
Are people with brain implants afraid to go through automatic doors?
EDIT: Hi downvoters! Is it common knowledge that they are afraid of automatic doors? This is the first I’ve heard of such fears. I know maybe two people with brain implants and they’ve never mentioned it. The article claims this is true, but it claims a lot of things without a lot of data.
the old devices were based on heart (cardiac) pacemakers which were designed to turn off w/ a magnet. A bit of a dark side to the old chestnut about it not being a bug, it's a feature...
The newer ones use bluetooth so hopefully less susceptible. But yeah, have had case reports of refridgerator doors, mall security, TSA agents overzealous w/ their wands, and one instance w/ a Prius, etc. There is a gizmo they get that they can put up to their device and turn it back on; that being said, a lot of ppl have lost theirs, or have let the AAA batteries in them run out...
56 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadI know if someone's opened up my skull. I assume everyone has some sort of multi-band wireless transceiver in their pocket, because that's a cell phone.
I could be wrong, but if that's how it is - well, it's not trivial to shield a needle to prevent it acting as an antenna.
Would be great if someone who knows this stuff can tell us how it really is.
You only need to shield the exposed parts.
> He thinks the theft-prevention system interfered with his implant and turned it off.
This makes far more sense as a possible cause of interference than a motion detector and motor.
On a related note, here's an interesting and informative video from Applied Science on how these tags work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAm7qAKAXwI
Cable tracing probes are not only good at picking up signals from the trace transmitter, they also amplify other types of EMF. You can hear a ton of noise from a keyboard as it goes through the scan loops. LCDs squeal at their refresh frequency. Automatic door detectors make a ton of noise too.
I'm not sure how close you'd have to be to the detector you'd have to be, but if the resonant frequency matched and you're tall enough to nearly make contact maybe it's a factor here.
Seriously, wearing a hat indoors is a strong cultural taboo in some regions.
It's hard to know without testing, but blocking this could require quite a lot of headgear. Way easier to build something that can take it better.
"To test such situations, he uses a detector that tells him the frequency of things like security systems to make sure they’re operating on a different frequency than his device. If the frequency is a match, he asks to go around."
Also, the statistical power of these results are quite strong. (Sometimes I think people screw up in teaching the "scientific method" as the traditional presentation tends to assume that you are dealing with some effect where you don't have a lot of statistical power, so people get this idea that you must have massive samples and do complicated statistics. This is not true. There are time you are justified in drawing strong conclusions from very small sets of data, because the statistical power is sufficient to justify it. You know this, because you do it all the time.)
And finally, this absolutely conforms with all current understandings of mainstream science and engineering. Massive amounts of engineering effort in the radio world are spent preventing, dealing with, and in some military type applications, causing radio interference. We're not talking about claims that UFOs are giving this guy Parkinson's, we're talking about perfectly sensible straightforward theories that were by far the dominant theory that an informed person would think of even before the overwhelming evidence that it is EM based.
Am I misunderstanding this, or do these devices not do even the most rudimentary false-input rejection? EMI is one thing, but it sounds more like their radio is accepting random noise as valid commands.
(Neighbor comment[1] suggests those devices don't have anything like firmware upgrades, so don't see why they need an actual receiver)
___
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712193
I'll fully admit I'm speculating. It just seems odd.
Shielding around these thin wires can be impractical in many situations due to the limited space afforded by the brain and skull.
To reprogram a pacemaker, you needed first to activate a reed switch with a magnet, then transmit the right commands, properly encrypted and with their matching checksums.
Parameters could of course not be set outside of safe bounds and in case of software failure there was a safe default mode that was running on dedicated hardware.
Either there are some really dumb companies developing active implants out there, or the article and allegations are sensationalistic conjectures.
Edit: I don't know much about brain implants, maybe induced currents in the electrode are enough to trigger some kind of seizure. This scenario may be possible. For a pacemaker though, I doubt that it would be possible to trigger a single extrasystole with normal electric or RF devices.
It wouldn't fix any of the other many possible failure modes, the sum total of which strikes me as much more likely to be the issue. Electronics can get weird.
These isn't a lot you can do about this sort of problem. The electrode used to stimulate is the main entry point for RF interference and you can't shield it for 3 reasons.
1)It adds size. You are effectively stabbing yourself in the brain with a coat hanger. Smaller is inherently better.
2)It adds mass. The difference in mass between a brain implant and your brain itself leads to brain damage in high kinetic situations like car accidents due to the different rates of acceleration.
3)Shielding an electrical stimulator prevents it from electrically stimulating thus defeating the purpose of the implant in the first place.
What you probably need is a robust RF limiting front end to protect the device from unintended signals which is a major design challenge depending on the nature of the stimulating signal and permissible heating.
Sorry, could not resist: MC Parkinson in the house yo, with bling on his mind.
EDIT: Hi downvoters! Is it common knowledge that they are afraid of automatic doors? This is the first I’ve heard of such fears. I know maybe two people with brain implants and they’ve never mentioned it. The article claims this is true, but it claims a lot of things without a lot of data.
The newer ones use bluetooth so hopefully less susceptible. But yeah, have had case reports of refridgerator doors, mall security, TSA agents overzealous w/ their wands, and one instance w/ a Prius, etc. There is a gizmo they get that they can put up to their device and turn it back on; that being said, a lot of ppl have lost theirs, or have let the AAA batteries in them run out...