Effects of electromagnetic interference on the functional usage of medical equipment by 2G/3G/4G cellular phones: A review

Abstract

There has been an increase in the potential use of wireless devices in healthcare domain for a variety of reasons. The most commonly used device is the cellular phone which emits strong electromagnetic energy affects the functioning of the vital medical equipment such as ventilators, ECG monitors, cardiac monitors, and defibrillators. This prompted the healthcare concerns to restrict the use of these phones in the in the proximity of critical and non-critical care medical equipment. Due to the developments made in the design of medical equipment to comply with the EMC standards, the restriction had been slowly laid off. Still, the researchers are concerned about the electromagnetic interference with medical devices by cellular phones in the healthcare domain and recommend for conducting continuous research to study their interaction with medical equipment. This paper overviews the certain investigations carried out in the recent years to study the electromagnetic interference between medical devices and 2G/3G/4G LTE cellular phones. During the initial development of cellular phones, the 2G cellular phones had caused more interference that affects the function and operation of some medical devices. The possibility of interference from 3G cellular phones with medical devices is considerably lower than the 2G phones, but still exist. Furthermore, almost all of the 4G phones have little to no interference with the medical devices. Currently, with the development of the medical devices industry, the current medical devices are designed to operate safely under any conditions of usage. Finally, a careful analysis would require statistics on the frequency of adverse events across the healthcare system, which apparently do not exist.