The June issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) includes a paper on EMI tests carried out by a research team at the academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Radio frequency identification devices have received considerable attention in the medical community since their use could readily identify patients accurately and thus prevent medical errors. Also, the electronics used in modern medical equipment represents a significant outlay of capital, and RFID tags can be used to track the location of devices even in a large urban medical complex with hundreds of patients. Despite their obvious utility, physicians have long been concerned about possible interference with electronic equipment vital to the care of critically ill patients. The article entitled “Electromagnetic Interference from Radio Frequency Identification Inducing Potentially Hazardous Incidents in Critical Care Medical Equipment” describes testing in which two RFID systems (active 125 kHz and passive 868 MHz), without a patient attached, were assessed under controlled conditions in the proximity of 41 medical devices representing 17 categories of devices from 22 manufacturers. In 123 tests (3 per device), RFID induced 24 incidents of EMI. Twenty-two were classified as hazardous; two as significant; and ten as light. The passive 868-MHz RFID device produced a higher number of incidents (26 incidents in 41 tests or 63 percent) compared with the active 125-kHz device (8 incidents in 41 tests or 20 percent). The median distance between the RFID reader and the medical device was 30 centimeters in all instances. Find an abstract of the article on the JAMAwebsite.
JAMA Publishes Story on Interference to Critical Care Medical Equipment from RFID Devices
