Ipod is safe for pacemaker, study reveals

A good news for those who cannot do anything without their ipod as a new study reveals ‘there is no harm in using ipod for long time for pacemaker people’. This new study proves ‘wrong’ the previous theory, which said, “The electromagnetic waves of ipod may interfere in pacemaker device.”

According to US Food and Drug Administration researchers, who conducted the research on a variety of fourth-generation ipod models like ipod with videos, ipod shuffle and ipod nano said that portable music players like ipod is not liable for electronic interference in implanted heart pacemakers.

Howard Bassen and his colleagues, the team member of the researchers in ‘BioMedical Engineering Online’, an open access journals in which the report of this new search have been published on February 01, wrote “A warning labels may be needed to avoid close contact between pacemakers and iPodsa. We performed an in-vitro study to evaluate these claims of EMI and present our findings of no-effects in this paper.”

Explaining about the method Bassen wrote, “We measured magnetic field emissions with a 3-coil sensor (diameter of 3.5 cm) placed within 1 cm of the surface of the player.” They have observed ‘highly’ localized fields (only existing in a one square cm area) with the peak magnetic field strength of 0.2 millionths of a Tesla. Tesla is used for measuring electromagnetic field. The observed power was very much lower for interfering the pacemaker.

“We also measured the voltages induced inside an ainstrumented-cana pacemaker with two standard unipolar leads.”, he wrote. “Each iPod was placed in the air, 2.7 cm above the pacemaker case. The pacemaker case and leads were placed in a saline filled torso simulator per pacemaker electromagnetic compatibility standard ANSI/AAMI PC69:2000. Voltages inside the can were measured.”, explored Bassen about the research procedures.

“Emissions consisted of 100 kHz sinusoidal signal with lower frequency (20 msec wide) pulsed amplitude modulation. Voltages induced in the iPods were below the noise level of our instruments (0.5 mV pp in the 0 a 1 kHz band or 2 mV pp in the 0 a 5 MHz bandwidth.”, Bassen wrote about extracted result.