
Why People with Brain Implants Are Afraid to Go Through Automatic Doors - wolfgke
http://gizmodo.com/why-people-with-brain-implants-are-afraid-to-go-through-1796452196
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wolfgang42
Despite the title, automatic doors seem to have nothing to do with it:

 _> He thinks the theft-prevention system interfered with his implant and
turned it off._

This makes far more sense as a possible cause of interference than a motion
detector and motor.

~~~
astrodust
The theft prevention systems use inductive power to activate the security
tags. If this matches the resonant frequency of an implant you could be in
trouble.

~~~
wolfgang42
Right, which is precisely why automatic doors are completely irrelevant.

On a related note, here's an interesting and informative video from Applied
Science on how these tags work:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAm7qAKAXwI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAm7qAKAXwI)

~~~
astrodust
Yeah, automatic doors are generally infra-red or ultrasonic though some of
them can spew out a bunch of nasty EMF.

Cable tracing probes are not only good at picking up signals from the trace
transmitter, they also amplify other types of EMF. You can hear a ton of noise
from a keyboard as it goes through the scan loops. LCDs squeal at their
refresh frequency. Automatic door detectors make a ton of noise too.

I'm not sure how close you'd have to be to the detector you'd have to be, but
if the resonant frequency matched and you're tall enough to nearly make
contact maybe it's a factor here.

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jimrandomh
The article is about someone whose brain implant failed, and concludes that
the problem was caused by electromagnetic interference. But this is pure
guesswork; no measurements were taken, no tests were performed and no
electrical engineers were consulted.

~~~
jerf
"Olhoeft is a retired professor of geophysics in Colorado who taught courses
on electromagnetism, so with those two details, it wasn’t hard for him to
figure out what had probably gone wrong. His implant, he says, operated at the
same electromagnetic frequency as Best Buy’s theft detection system, and the
two signals interfered with each other."

"To test such situations, he uses a detector that tells him the frequency of
things like security systems to make sure they’re operating on a different
frequency than his device. If the frequency is a match, he asks to go around."

Also, the statistical power of these results are quite strong. (Sometimes I
think people screw up in teaching the "scientific method" as the traditional
presentation tends to assume that you are dealing with some effect where you
don't have a lot of statistical power, so people get this idea that you _must_
have massive samples and do complicated statistics. This is not true. There
are time you are justified in drawing strong conclusions from very small sets
of data, because the statistical power is sufficient to justify it. You know
this, because _you do it all the time_.)

And finally, this absolutely conforms with all current understandings of
mainstream science and engineering. Massive amounts of engineering effort in
the radio world are spent preventing, dealing with, and in some military type
applications, causing radio interference. We're not talking about claims that
UFOs are giving this guy Parkinson's, we're talking about perfectly sensible
straightforward theories that were by _far_ the dominant theory that an
informed person would think of even before the overwhelming evidence that it
is EM based.

~~~
sin7
Sample size is too small and correlation does not equal causation are the
worst. Teachers did a great job teaching those things, but sometimes
correlation does equal causation or at the very least is interesting enough to
warrant a closer look rather than to be dismissed so easily. At the same time,
a sample size of one is good enough to prove something in a scientific way. If
I claim to know the lottery numbers, I can prove it by winning the next
lottery. In doing so I beat 1 to 5 million odds, which are greater than the 1
in twenty that most studies require.

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Filligree
Encryption was mentioned as a possible fix, which made me go WTF.

Am I misunderstanding this, or do these devices not do even the most
rudimentary false-input rejection? EMI is one thing, but it sounds more like
their radio is accepting random noise as valid commands.

~~~
drdaeman
Uh. I thought it was all about parasitic currents. Strong enough EM fields
induce those in the wires, brain gets stimulation and goes into seizure, this
sort of stuff.

(Neighbor comment[1] suggests those devices don't have anything like firmware
upgrades, so don't see why they need an actual receiver)

___

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712193)

~~~
Filligree
That would be the obvious interpretation, yes. Induced currents from EMI can
be dangerous, and implants don't necessarily have the luxury of shielding, but
if that _was_ why... then how would encryption help?

I'll fully admit I'm speculating. It just seems odd.

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timothycrosley
Serious question: Could a user of such a device, wear some sort of protective
hat for situations like this? Since you can't really fully predict where
interference can occur, and otherwise avoiding it could cause you not to be
able to have anything resembling a normal life.

~~~
csours
I'm probably on a list now: [https://www.amazon.com/Shielded-Protection-
against-Radio-Fre...](https://www.amazon.com/Shielded-Protection-against-
Radio-Frequency-Radiation/dp/B005I4D5GO)

~~~
samueloph
that looks like a nice way to concentrate all the rf radiation right in the
center of your brain, doesn't this ricochet all the rf that enters from below
the hat?

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noahmbarr
Surprised the the word shielding doesn’t appear anywhere in this article.

~~~
jaclaz
In the case of a brain implant, shielding would mean more or less a tinfoil
hat, however.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
The device itself could perhaps be better shielded, before implantation.

~~~
radicaldreamer
Do brain implants get firmware updates and such wirelessly?

~~~
maxxxxx
My company produces brain implants. Technically you can upgrade the firmware
wirelessly (we do this in testing all the time) but nobody wants to take the
responsibility for doing that with patients. With more RAM available I think
wireless upgrade will be the standard in a few years.

~~~
ams6110
Wireless updates viewed as riskier than surgery? Or is it just that the
liability moves from your company to the surgeon?

~~~
maxxxxx
For a wireless update you need to be able to store the new firmware in a temp
area, verify it and then activate it. Old devices don't have enough memory but
that's changing. Also, most new firmware needs new hardware features so this
capability may not be that useful in practice.

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caycep
the old devices were based on heart (cardiac) pacemakers which were designed
to turn off w/ a magnet. A bit of a dark side to the old chestnut about it not
being a bug, it's a feature...

The newer ones use bluetooth so hopefully less susceptible. But yeah, have had
case reports of refridgerator doors, mall security, TSA agents overzealous w/
their wands, and one instance w/ a Prius, etc. There is a gizmo they get that
they can put up to their device and turn it back on; that being said, a lot of
ppl have lost theirs, or have let the AAA batteries in them run out...

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nsnick
It should only take a few deaths and lawsuits for this go be fixed.

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emXdem
What about faraday cages?

~~~
eatmyshorts
Wait, are you suggesting the person with the brain implant wear a literal tin-
foil hat?

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lowbloodsugar
Tinfoil hat!

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egwynn
_Are_ people with brain implants afraid to go through automatic doors?

EDIT: Hi downvoters! Is it common knowledge that they are afraid of automatic
doors? This is the first I’ve heard of such fears. I know maybe two people
with brain implants and they’ve never mentioned it. The article claims this is
true, but it claims a lot of things without a lot of data.

