The effect of electromagnetic interference from mobile communication on the performance of intensive care ventilators.
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2005-08-25
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
UNLABELLED Electromagnetic interference produced by wireless communication can affect medical devices and hospital policies exist to address this risk During the transfer of ventilated patients these policies may be compromised by essential communication between base and receiving hospitals Local wireless networks e g Bluetooth may reduce the spaghetti syndrome of wires and cables seen on intensive care units but also generate electromagnetic interference The aim of this study was to investigate these effects on displayed and actual ventilator performance METHODS Five ventilators were tested Drager Oxylog 2000 BREAS LTV 1000 Respironics BiPAP VISION Puritan Bennett 7200 and 840 Electromagnetic interference was generated by three devices Simoco 8020 radio handset Nokia 7210 and Nokia 6230 mobile phone Nokia 6230 communicating via Bluetooth with a Palm Tungsten T Personal Digital Assistant We followed the American National Standard Recommended Practice for On Site Ad Hoc Testing ANSI C63 for electromagnetic interference We used a ventilator tester to simulate healthy adult lungs and measure ventilator performance The communication device under test was moved in towards each ventilator from a distance of 1 m in six axes Alarms or error codes on the ventilator were recorded as was ventilator performance RESULTS All ventilators tested except for the Respironics VISION showed a display error when subjected to electromagnetic interference from the Nokia phones and Simoco radio Ventilator performance was only affected by the radio which caused the Puritan Bennett 840 to stop functioning completely The transfer ventilators performance were not affected by radio or mobile phone although the mobile phone did trigger a low power alarm Effects on intensive care ventilators included display reset with the ventilator restoring normal display function within 2 s and low power low pressure alarms Bluetooth transmission had no effect on the function of all the ventilators tested CONCLUSION In a clinical setting high power output devices such as a two way radio may cause significant interference in ventilator function Medium power output devices such as mobile phones may cause minor alarm triggers Low power output devices such as Bluetooth appear to cause no interference with ventilator function