Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Stop the sensationalism of medical device security

There have been some recent blog posts that sensationalize research on electromagnetic inference and medical devices. Worse, some statements are just factually wrong and misleading to the public. For instance, we did not use a Weezer song in any experiments involving defibrillators or pacemakers, and we did not conclude that listening to any music could harm medical devices. For an accurate non-technical summary of this work, read the MedGadget story.

The full technical paper on mitigating the risks of electromagnetic interference on analog sensors appeared at the 34th Annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The sky is not falling, and we're quite clear that patients can remain confident in the safety of their devices. Medical devices do a world of good.