Nearly half a million pacemakers vulnerable to hacking

[MindWars]

Nearly Half a Million Pacemakers Vulnerable to Hacking

Nearly half a million pacemakers are vulnerable to hacks that could be fatal for the device’s user, the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) said Tuesday.

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Everything and anything can be hacked, but oh they'll sell you non critical thinkers a bottle of shit and tell you how safe it is to eat it all. And you'll believe it.

 

[Montrovant]

Nearly Half a Million Pacemakers Vulnerable to Hacking

Nearly half a million pacemakers are vulnerable to hacks that could be fatal for the device’s user, the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) said Tuesday.

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Everything and anything can be hacked, but oh they'll sell you non critical thinkers a bottle of shit and tell you how safe it is to eat it all. And you'll believe it.

What, specifically, would you like to see done?

 

[waltky]

New Technology Being Developed for Pacemakers...

New Technology Being Developed for Pacemakers
March 21, 2018 | WASHINGTON — You may have seen this on TV: Someone whose heart has gone into a wildly abnormal rhythm, or whose heart has stopped, is shocked when a medic uses defibrillator paddles to restart the heart.

The electric shock is so powerful that the body convulses and the patient screams. You can see it on YouTube if you search for “defibrillator shock.” The video makes clear what patients go through, including those who have defibrillators implanted in their hearts. Aydin Babakhani, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, likens implantable defibrillators to dial up telephones, which have long since been replaced by smartphones. “Pacemakers use a very old technology. They still use wires. They still use batteries. And they are bulky and large,” he said.

New ways for the heart

Babakhani places tiny sensors on very small chips for industrial and medical use. Before his move to UCLA, he worked at Rice University, where he began collaborating with Dr. Mehdi Razavi, a cardiologist at the Texas Heart Institute. The men were investigating new ways to pace and defibrillate the heart. The collaboration was easy because Rice is across the street from the heart institute.

As a cardiac electrophysiologist, Razavi wants to be able to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm without shocking the patient. Razavi says the idea of placing a number of small chips in the heart could achieve that goal. “The limitation up to now with using pacing is that we simply do not have enough pacing sites to distribute this energy across the heart muscle,” he said. Babakhani developed small chips to pace the heart and help it stay in a normal rhythm. They are smaller than a dime, less than 18 millimeters long. This pacing system has no battery and no leads, the wires that connect the battery to the heart in traditional pacemakers.

Traumatic, painful event

Even when there’s no pain, defibrillation has a huge impact. When John O’Leary’s implanted defibrillator sent shocks to his heart to get it back into a normal rhythm, it stopped him cold. “I thought I walked into a lamp post,” he said. “There was no pain whatsoever. I really felt that I walked into something hard.”

Razavi says another problem with the pacemaker/defibrillators now in use is that once patients are defibrillated, many of them feel traumatized. It can take more than one shock to get the heart back into a normal rhythm. Anne Bunting said she screamed in pain through repeated defibrillations. “It saved my life that day, but it was also a fearsome thing to go through because it was so painful,” she said.

Preclinical trials promising

See also:

Implantable Heart Defibrillators Deliver Shock in More Ways Than One
March 20, 2018 - A resting heart rate of more than 100 beats per minute can be life-threatening. It means the heart is beating too fast to pump blood to the rest of the body, including the brain and the lungs. This can cause the heart to suddenly stop beating. It can cause a stroke or heart failure.

A implantable cardioverter defibrillator, commonly known as an ICD, can prevent sudden death, but the device has drawbacks. One is pain. The other is fear of defibrillation. John O'Leary got an ICD about a year after having a heart attack. "I had a couple of episodes where I became dizzy while exercising. I was out biking, and in one instant, actually, I think I lost conscious for a brief second or so," he said. "I thought it was probably just dehydration, heat, what have you." But it wasn't anything he suspected. Instead, O'Leary had the classic symptoms of a heart rhythm disorder. The lower chambers of his heart were beating too fast and irregularly. The ICD acts instantly when a patient's heart rhythm goes out of sync.

Medronic, a company that makes ICDs, reports that every month, 10,000 people in the U.S. have one implanted. Here's how it works: A doctor inserts a small electronic device under the skin, usually under the collarbone. The ICD is powered by a battery. It's connected to one or more sensing wires, called leads, that are implanted in the heart. If the heart is out of rhythm, the ICD automatically sends small electrical signals through the leads to correct it. If that doesn't work, the defibrillator delivers a shock to restore the heart to a normal rate. "That's just the basic physics of the process," said Dr. Mehdi Razavi, an electrophysiologist at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. "When you deliver a shock, there's pain involved."

Like 'lightning'

O'Leary didn't experience any pain, but Anne Bunting did. "It was like being hit by lightning. I actually saw a flash of white light and the sound that lightning makes coming down a tree, and then, boom! And it shocked me five times in a row, and I was screaming. That's how much it hurt." Bunting got on the floor to keep herself from falling. Razavi said that when shocks are delivered, they can happen more than once. "You can have half a dozen shocks in a row, and that's typically because the underlying cause has not been immediately reversed," he said. O'Leary compares the shock to walking into a lamp post or a wall. It happened while he was walking toward his car in a parking lot. "There was no lamp post, no wall, there was nothing between me and the car. But that's exactly what it felt like." He also saw a flash of light, which he figured to be the electrical discharge. Then he realized what had happened.

More improvements sought

Over the years, ICD designs have improved. The devices are smaller and less invasive than they used to be. But Razavi wants them smaller still. And he doesn't want patients to even notice that they are being defibrillated. He is working with an electrical engineer at the University of California-Los Angeles to develop small chips that provide small, inconspicuous shocks that return the heart to a normal rhythm, without the patient's noticing — no flash of light, no pain, no feeling of having walked into a wall. Razavi and Aydin Babakhani, the UCLA professor of engineering, feel that they are on to something that fills the bill. It's at least five years away from being available to heart patients, but the men are confident they'll get there.

Implantable Heart Defibrillators Deliver Shock in More Ways Than One