Place phone in pants pocket not shirt pocket.
I wonder if this is a new phenomena with wireless charging or if other phones could have caused problems and were never tested.
When I take a nap and set the alarm on my phone to vibrate only instead of ringing, I place the phone on my chest so that it wakes me up. Because of this post on HN, if I ever get an ICD, I now know better. I wonder how many people don't know.
When you get an ICD, they explain all of this to you. Even before the recent warning about iPhone 12's, they explained how the device interacts with magnets and to avoid them.
Patient in hospital. In bed. On back. Phone sits of chest while they sleep. Device stops. Alarms. Flashing lights. Nurses running. This is a necessary PSA.
A patient in a hospital bed isn't of any real concern with this. There will be no alarms or nurses running if the device is disabled, only if the patient's heart stops. And their heart would have stopped either way, because the ICD isn't keeping their heart running. It's there in case it stops, and if they're in a hospital bed there will be people around ready to attend to them if their heart stops.
I keep my phone in my pocket but I think some people may be hesitant to keep their phone in the pocket for concerns about radiation from the phone in proximity to their testicles.
It's a PSA: if you have an implanted defibrillator, don't keep iPhone 12 in a shirt pocket. No need for any more drama than that. Reminds me of antennagate, to which Jobs responded: "Don't hold it that way."
Idk, with my life on the line I wouldn’t buy an iPhone 12 at all. Sure, I don’t usually keep my phone in my shirt pocket, but it’s a fairly natural thing to do in some circumstances, what if I forget?
Think of the likely user who has a pacemaker. They are probably a man, he's probably in his 60s, 70s, or 80s. He's likely not all that familiar with the intricacies of modern phones. His kids probably convinced him to get a phone so he could stay in touch more easily. That's the audience we're talking about here.
It'll happen a lot and while it's happening the lifesaving device is fully disabled. That's a big deal.
The joke was "it will only happen once, because it will kill you".
(Which is inaccurate, of course, since it sounds from the article like disabling a pacemaker in this way will only open up an opportunity for your heart to fail.)
I’ve carried my iPhone in my shirt pocket for almost as long as the iPhone has been in existence. I’m current,y in the iPhone 7 Plus, because the 8 didn’t have anything I wanted, and I refuse to use Face ID for anything.
I’m also over fifty, overweight, and am more likely than average to need a pacemaker or similar device within the next few years.
I hadn’t considered the iPhone 12 problem until now, after it has been explained to me. Yikes!
What other strong magnets do you keep in your pocket or come into contact with regularly, that can interfere with an implanted medical device that can cause an organ failure?
Nobody is forcing anyone to keep any particular magnet anywhere. Plenty of people, including successful tech and non-tech people, do just fine without smartphones. iOS is not a requisite for a fulfilling life.
Note it, inform people about it, mitigate the effects where possible and research ways to eliminate the issue entirely. But it's not exactly an emergency by any reasonable definition and the pearl-clutching "drama" is a bit much.
Yeah, it's definitely worth the drama, but personally I'm more scandalized that biomedical engineers still use unmodulated magnetic fields to switch implanted defibrillators than I am scandalized by the fact that the iPhone emits a magnetic field. iPhones aren't the only thing that emits a magnetic field. Not by a long shot. Not by accident, not by intent. I'm sure being able to use a magnet to switch these implants is handy, but putting inductive transceivers on every EMT's toolbelt and in every operating room isn't a physics challenge or an engineering challenge, not with the amount of money in the medical world. It's an implementation challenge, yes, but it's one that should have happened 20 years ago. Due to the severity of their work the medical community is used to always getting its way, but in this case they're the ones who need to shape up.
The minute you require the presence of a non-standard tool for emergency medical attention that could impact an ICD, you've guaranteed that it will not be present in some cases. It's very likely that such a decision will have a body count.
For the last xx years of ICDs, ~nobody with ICDs carried magnets in their pockets. So the body count of the 'current situation' is likely 0. Now that phones are ubiquitous and some are including magnets powerful enough to interfere, there's a new issue.
The magnet is usually used as a mitigator to turn off the device in case the device is doing something wrong like producing pulses too fast. There is typically RF communication that can communicate to the device and can often be used to turn the magnet detection off, which means that the device will not quit working when a magnet is detected.
A warning is good thing, but the drama is less welcome. Blaming Apple is absurd too: the defibrillators have built-in kill switch that responds to strong magnetic fields. At the time where this was designed it was concluded that it is very unlikely for such strong magnetic fields to occur in real life. Well, that assumption is wrong these days.
It is a responsibility of the designers of the medical devices to assure they are safe. Furthermore they naturally have to be replaced every few years, so it isn't even hard to phase out the outdated design in a coordinated fashion. But I guess this costs money and it is cheaper to blame others.
Seems to me like both the cell phone maker and the medical device maker want to pass the blame to each other. That said, medical devices should get more leeway here - they already come with warnings, just like medicines too (e.g. don't take with alcohol). When a device is implanted the doctors and the manufacturer pass on the warnings to the patient. However, they obviously can't pass on warnings about future tech that they didn't predict would exist and interfere with their device. In such cases, since Apple's new tech is the one causing the issues, I feel Apple (and other phone manufacturers) need to be more proactive and should publicise and caution the public that their mobile phone may interfere with implanted medical devices.
Pacemakers need to be replaced every 5-15 years as the battery wears out [1]. It's not like a visit to the dentist either, it's a major surgery. I also think you underestimate how rapidly a medical device company can make a dramatic change to the design, have it tested and approved, and distributed inside everyday people. Yes it's "coordinated" but the timeline is extremely long compared to how often the phone market is being pumped full of magnets.
For what it's worth I think it's still up to the user to be safe and know what they can and cannot have up against their chest. But to say that the medical community can just be "agile" about this is to really misunderstand how those devices are certified and designed.
Nowhere in my comment did I suggest a timeline for the design change to happen. Yes, it will take years, but it cannot happen at all if the device manufacturers keep blaming others for their poor designs.
And ICD is not a pacemaker. An ICD costs about $30K. When its battery wears out, the battery is replaced, not the ICD. So there will be no replacements of already-implanted ICDs because of this problem.
Also, it is a big deal to redesign an implanted medical device, as it should be. These are not tongue depressors. ICDs are the most tightly regulated device the FDA reviews.
> It's not like a visit to the dentist either, it's a major surgery.
My father had a pacemaker, and for long enough to receive a battery swap. The battery for that particular model was implanted under his shoulder blade; the swap-out was performed under local anaesthetic.
The original implantation was a bit more complex from a surgical perspective, requiring keyhole surgery and an angioplasty to run the wire around his heart as well as to implant the battery and controller. But the point is: these devices can be installed and expected to perform for decades, so the engineering design is of necessity highly conservative and has long-term maintenance in mind. It's also safety-critical: if the device malfunctions, people can die.
PS: a pacemaker is not an implanted defibrillator. (Also, my father died in 2017, so what I'm describing is probably a decade or two behind the state of the art.)
Blaming Apple is not absurd. The interaction between magnets near the chest and cardiac rhythm devices has been well known since at least the 1980s. Even I can remember a published case report of a person carrying a stereo speaker, and a magnet in the speaker deactivated his ICD.
If Apple were two guys in a garage, you could forgive them. But a trillion dollar company... not so much.
The magnet is usually used as a mitigator to turn off the device in case the device is doing something wrong like producing pulses too fast. There is typically RF communication that can communicate to the device and can often be used to turn the magnet detection off, which means that the device will not quit working when a magnet is detected. This was used in the past for electric trains or other large magnets such as in factories.
Apple did more than just utter a sentence. Everyone who owned one of the phones was entitled to a free bumper case, and Apple eventually settled a class-action suit, agreeing to pay $15/user.
The heart itself is kind of an electromagnetic device - are there any studies on the health implications in healthy people of having powerful magnets placed next to it?
As far as we can tell... Yes, such a magnet exists. But it costs the power of a small city to maintain its field, and the patient would experience all kinds of strange effects, including levitating in it as it induced magnetic forces across their water molecules...
(Seriously though, there are research magnets powerful enough to levitate plastic that people have jammed their hands into with no ill effects. It seems that across a wide range of intensities at least, the human body just does not care. This is, perhaps, surprising given how much electrochemical activity is necessary for continued homeostasis, but it appears to be observationally true).
I know of an 11T MRI (in Paris, IIRC) which knocks people unconscious when they move too fast. Apparently, the field across your skull inhibits (some) spike propagation. Doesn't require that much power.
It's not unique to MRIs, but it's one of the niche applications where this happens.
Working in certain environments (IIRC >2T) requires special training, that include things like "slow walking", since moving too fast would induce currents in the brain that could knock you out.
For a product that I worked in we had to find a cheap way to create a 2T static field for validation, the complications of each of the possibilities were amazing.
In a brief search, I found this strange and interesting article from 1983, regarding experiments conducted at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California:
TL;DR - there were detectable effects on heart function, eye function and possibly sense of direction. The effects were deemed safe at the levels studied.
Here is the study the article appears to be about (on page 86, as numbered in the scan):
For what it’s worth, the FDA published a similar warning[1] earlier this year. I’m a little surprised the proliferation of random accessories (phone cases, headphones, etc) with strong-ish neodymium magnets over the last few years hadn’t already raised an alarm.
Especially since magnets are used so widely in so many products you'd think that even some sort of test/certification/measurement that would happen anyway (RFI?) would also note that there is a strong field present. This stuff gets measured all the time, also for equipment that is to be used in aerospace and hospitals... the whole concept of devices interfering with each other isn't new. But apparently it's still overlooked when it's about consumer electronics as if those couldn't possible interfere/cause interference.
> This stuff gets measured all the time, also for equipment that is to be used in aerospace and hospitals...
They only measure dynamic magnetic fields (i.e. electromagnetic fields). There are essentially no regulatory limits in static fields, since they don't really interfere with RF signals.
In fact, is amazingly easy to purchase neodymium magnets of a size that should not be that easily available, which explains the hilarious safety videos like this one[1]
Now that I read that, it seems obvious that static fields and RF wouldn't interact like that... Thanks!
The video is very well done (for a semi-pro it seems?), it's one of those things where people (including me) might think "oh yeah magnets, I know about those" but you actually don't, or at last not at the scale that you might need.
That reminds me of this LPL video about Gallium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeghGhVdt9s where you might think: oh yeah, metals, those are sturdy blocks that you need to weld or saw.
In this case, the magnet isn't really interfering with the ICD in the strictest sense of the word, because ICDs are deliberately designed to be disabled by magnets.
UK ICD-user here. So three weeks ago I had a severe ventricular fibrillation episode - I fell unconscious, had bystander defibrillation, air ambulance to hospital and two days later had an ICD fitted just below my left collar bone and was out of hospital the next day.
I use an iPhone 12Pro. The advice I was given was don't hold any phone closer than six inches away from the device- so holding it to my right ear is fine. Mag fields right next to the device can stop it sensing or in rare circumstances can cause a factory reset.
The biggest EM hazards in my house are the induction hobs on my cooker - these are worse than the phone. On full power I have to keep at least 60cm away from them or they will blind / alarm the ICD. So I am more concerned about them than the phone.
[Edit] Other hazards are drills held close to my chest and even the capes used by hair-dressers that have magnetic clasps to stay shut. Standing right next to the speakers at a concert is also not-advised.
Hope you're doing better now after the ICD! My 81 year old father had one fitted a few months ago and it's been pretty much life changing (once he was allowed out of the hospital, they managed to nick his lung, which was a whole big thing).
Was going to say induction hobs - that's a huge one, especially as gas is eventually phased out and they become the defacto hob type.
NHS recommendation[1] is, as you said, 6 inches for most mobile phones, but no special callout for the 12.
Apple goes further[2] and says 12 inches when wirelessly charging, which also makes sense.
Thank you! I'm just 60 and was (I believed) in good health. My VF episode was a glitch in my heart's conduction cycle, and the various tests I received show that my heart is physically healthy. So I feel 'perfectly okay' apart the almost dying thing. My biggest health issue now is the cracked risks from the superbly enthusiastic CPR I received, but the pain from coughing and moving awkwardly is a small price to pay.
In addition to heart implants, cochlear implants are an issue too. Not only that but the electronics for controlling the implant require an iPhone app.
Question for phone repair folks: On teardown photos, it seems like the iPhone magnets are accessible after dealing with a few layers of adhesive. Is it possible and if so, how difficult is it to remove the ring of magnets?
The problem appears to me to be a design problem of the implanted devices, not the iPhone.
Unless I'm mistaken this is what's happening:
1. ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).
2.However, this is not trivial since a human body is a bag of salt water. Therefore low frequencies are needed.
3. Low frequencies are very difficult at the necessary length scales with electric fields, so they used the magnetic field instead.
So far, so good. But then they assumed that the person would never be next to a magnet? That's a design flaw on their end, not the iPhone's. There's magnets, and low moving large currents, everywhere!
The should have implemented a primitive type of port knocking.
The actual problem is that EM fields blind the device so that they can't sense the cardiac arrhythmias they are designed to fix, this rendering them useless.
> ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).
My St Jude Ellipse ICD communicates bidirectionally (control inputs in, telemetry out).
I'll leave it to you, a user, that strong EM fields also blind the devices. The signals the ICD is trying to measure are very weak. I can imagine that strong 50/60Hz surge currents really screw things up, especially in single conductor power distribution situations (UK ring circuits, rural farms, etc).
That being said, the article (TL/DR) appears to focus on "static" magnetic fields. The near field charging feature of the iPhone barely makes mention.
I think the "disable ICD" being a simple magnetized reed switch for an implantable medical device is a bit silly. At least tap a code into that reed switch a little!
The entire medical devices industry tackles this issue just fine (for example, I have a percussion vest for respiratory therapy that uses strong magnets, and there's no shortage of warnings).
ICD patient and avid cell phone user here. They tell us magnets will disable the device. This is by design, they include a hall effect sensor to allow medical personnel to disable the devices. They aren't exactly specific about how big a magnet and how close it has to be.
My device sends data to a base station which reports back and is also interrogated every 6 months by a electrophysiologist and they can see if and when it has been disabled.
Mine has been disabled twice so far, once by using the Boston Scientific interrogation device to turn it off, and once by a surgeon taping a magnet to my chest!
I don't know the entire story, but my wife is a cardiac ICU nurse and says magnets are part of the normal procedures for dealing with ICDs. They'll slap a magnet on the chest of an ICD patient to inhibit the device if it malfunctions.
All I'm saying from that is while a lot of comments around here are calling it design flaws, I'm pretty sure to a certain extent its a design decision. If you have a patient on the stretcher and you need to disable that thing now then a magnet seems like a perfectly reasonable & safe thing to use. Requiring specialized devices that might not be available at all times seems like the design flaw. Asking patients with specific health needs to avoid certain activities/devices is not a huge stretch.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadI keep my phone in my pocket but I think some people may be hesitant to keep their phone in the pocket for concerns about radiation from the phone in proximity to their testicles.
And there may be something to it. In particular if you keep your phone in your pocket while using hands free and having conversations on the phone. https://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-reproduction/news/2008...
"ah, you'll be fine" seriously?
Think of the likely user who has a pacemaker. They are probably a man, he's probably in his 60s, 70s, or 80s. He's likely not all that familiar with the intricacies of modern phones. His kids probably convinced him to get a phone so he could stay in touch more easily. That's the audience we're talking about here.
It'll happen a lot and while it's happening the lifesaving device is fully disabled. That's a big deal.
(Which is inaccurate, of course, since it sounds from the article like disabling a pacemaker in this way will only open up an opportunity for your heart to fail.)
I’m also over fifty, overweight, and am more likely than average to need a pacemaker or similar device within the next few years.
I hadn’t considered the iPhone 12 problem until now, after it has been explained to me. Yikes!
So a problem of phone calls disconnecting reminds you of phones causing cardiac problems with people using pacemakers?
Kinda worth making some drama about it, no?
Note it, inform people about it, mitigate the effects where possible and research ways to eliminate the issue entirely. But it's not exactly an emergency by any reasonable definition and the pearl-clutching "drama" is a bit much.
It is a responsibility of the designers of the medical devices to assure they are safe. Furthermore they naturally have to be replaced every few years, so it isn't even hard to phase out the outdated design in a coordinated fashion. But I guess this costs money and it is cheaper to blame others.
For what it's worth I think it's still up to the user to be safe and know what they can and cannot have up against their chest. But to say that the medical community can just be "agile" about this is to really misunderstand how those devices are certified and designed.
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
Also, it is a big deal to redesign an implanted medical device, as it should be. These are not tongue depressors. ICDs are the most tightly regulated device the FDA reviews.
My father had a pacemaker, and for long enough to receive a battery swap. The battery for that particular model was implanted under his shoulder blade; the swap-out was performed under local anaesthetic.
The original implantation was a bit more complex from a surgical perspective, requiring keyhole surgery and an angioplasty to run the wire around his heart as well as to implant the battery and controller. But the point is: these devices can be installed and expected to perform for decades, so the engineering design is of necessity highly conservative and has long-term maintenance in mind. It's also safety-critical: if the device malfunctions, people can die.
PS: a pacemaker is not an implanted defibrillator. (Also, my father died in 2017, so what I'm describing is probably a decade or two behind the state of the art.)
If Apple were two guys in a garage, you could forgive them. But a trillion dollar company... not so much.
Image if a simple magnet could be used to start your car or to unlock your front door.
That a cheap keyfob has more embedded security that a piece of life-giving medical equipment is just unbelievable.
As you have said, powerful magnets have been common in private homes for 50 years.
There's no way this is Apples fault.
There must be a point at which a magnet of power n causes a negative effect that increases along with n, time, and exponentially with proximity?
(Seriously though, there are research magnets powerful enough to levitate plastic that people have jammed their hands into with no ill effects. It seems that across a wide range of intensities at least, the human body just does not care. This is, perhaps, surprising given how much electrochemical activity is necessary for continued homeostasis, but it appears to be observationally true).
[1] https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic-levit...
Deserves its own post.
Working in certain environments (IIRC >2T) requires special training, that include things like "slow walking", since moving too fast would induce currents in the brain that could knock you out.
For a product that I worked in we had to find a cheap way to create a 2T static field for validation, the complications of each of the possibilities were amazing.
In a brief search, I found this strange and interesting article from 1983, regarding experiments conducted at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California:
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/22/science/do-enormous-magne...
TL;DR - there were detectable effects on heart function, eye function and possibly sense of direction. The effects were deemed safe at the levels studied.
Here is the study the article appears to be about (on page 86, as numbered in the scan):
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
Going by its closing remarks, it appears this was an active field of research at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_therapy
1. https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/cell-phones/...
They only measure dynamic magnetic fields (i.e. electromagnetic fields). There are essentially no regulatory limits in static fields, since they don't really interfere with RF signals.
In fact, is amazingly easy to purchase neodymium magnets of a size that should not be that easily available, which explains the hilarious safety videos like this one[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t8yDnyOaQ8
The video is very well done (for a semi-pro it seems?), it's one of those things where people (including me) might think "oh yeah magnets, I know about those" but you actually don't, or at last not at the scale that you might need.
That reminds me of this LPL video about Gallium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeghGhVdt9s where you might think: oh yeah, metals, those are sturdy blocks that you need to weld or saw.
I use an iPhone 12Pro. The advice I was given was don't hold any phone closer than six inches away from the device- so holding it to my right ear is fine. Mag fields right next to the device can stop it sensing or in rare circumstances can cause a factory reset.
The biggest EM hazards in my house are the induction hobs on my cooker - these are worse than the phone. On full power I have to keep at least 60cm away from them or they will blind / alarm the ICD. So I am more concerned about them than the phone.
[Edit] Other hazards are drills held close to my chest and even the capes used by hair-dressers that have magnetic clasps to stay shut. Standing right next to the speakers at a concert is also not-advised.
Was going to say induction hobs - that's a huge one, especially as gas is eventually phased out and they become the defacto hob type.
NHS recommendation[1] is, as you said, 6 inches for most mobile phones, but no special callout for the 12.
Apple goes further[2] and says 12 inches when wirelessly charging, which also makes sense.
[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pacemaker-implantation/recover... [2] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211900
Thank you! I'm just 60 and was (I believed) in good health. My VF episode was a glitch in my heart's conduction cycle, and the various tests I received show that my heart is physically healthy. So I feel 'perfectly okay' apart the almost dying thing. My biggest health issue now is the cracked risks from the superbly enthusiastic CPR I received, but the pain from coughing and moving awkwardly is a small price to pay.
Unless I'm mistaken this is what's happening:
1. ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).
2.However, this is not trivial since a human body is a bag of salt water. Therefore low frequencies are needed.
3. Low frequencies are very difficult at the necessary length scales with electric fields, so they used the magnetic field instead.
So far, so good. But then they assumed that the person would never be next to a magnet? That's a design flaw on their end, not the iPhone's. There's magnets, and low moving large currents, everywhere!
The should have implemented a primitive type of port knocking.
The actual problem is that EM fields blind the device so that they can't sense the cardiac arrhythmias they are designed to fix, this rendering them useless.
> ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).
My St Jude Ellipse ICD communicates bidirectionally (control inputs in, telemetry out).
That being said, the article (TL/DR) appears to focus on "static" magnetic fields. The near field charging feature of the iPhone barely makes mention.
I think the "disable ICD" being a simple magnetized reed switch for an implantable medical device is a bit silly. At least tap a code into that reed switch a little!
My device sends data to a base station which reports back and is also interrogated every 6 months by a electrophysiologist and they can see if and when it has been disabled.
Mine has been disabled twice so far, once by using the Boston Scientific interrogation device to turn it off, and once by a surgeon taping a magnet to my chest!
All I'm saying from that is while a lot of comments around here are calling it design flaws, I'm pretty sure to a certain extent its a design decision. If you have a patient on the stretcher and you need to disable that thing now then a magnet seems like a perfectly reasonable & safe thing to use. Requiring specialized devices that might not be available at all times seems like the design flaw. Asking patients with specific health needs to avoid certain activities/devices is not a huge stretch.