…was that true?
DID cell phone signals in fact interfere with electronic medical equipment? Now cell phones are everywhere in hospitals and medical offices, and apparently there’s no problem. I’m talking about 15-20-ish years ago, when cell phones weren’t as prevalent as they are now.
Have cell phones changed that much, or was that a lie back then?
Probably more a matter of being better safe than sorry.
I’m sure some of it was “better safe than sorry” and some was to discourage using the phone because it interfered with people- for example, the people I see who answer their phones while talking to someone at he front desk at the doctors office are interrupting their conversation with the staff and not getting out of the way so staff can talk to the next person.
Same thing with phones/planes - even assuming phones interfere with the plane ( and my recollection is the problem is not the plane, but the phone will connect with too many cell towers), lots of phones have wifi calling (which doesn't involve towers) and lots of planes have wifi. Still can't use phones even though cell towers don't have to be involved.It was based on a real possibility of interference:
A few years later:
https://www.jwatch.org/fw200703120000002/2007/03/12/cell-phones-do-not-interfere-with-hospital
It’s a bit of both.
Telecom companies liked the policy because it’s better for their systems if phones don’t switch towers so often. That’s still the case.
But phones, even now, have a small possibility of interfering with flight controls and local comms, especially during takeoff and landing. That’s why airplane mode is a thing now so that at least the comms gear can be shut off. There’s at least some evidence that flight controls have been affected in a small number of cases.
There is a question of just how much interference they can cause, and of course, much will depend on make/model/etc. So far, it appears it does affect air travel but to a relatively small degree and the FAA has decided, partially because so many people were already cheating and it hadn’t been a major issue, to relax some restrictions. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily completely “safe” (if by ‘safe’ you mean absolutely no risk) but partly we’re bowing to the reality of modern cell phone use (it’s almost impossible to police even in a confined space like an airplane) and partly there’s been more and better study of the issue now so we have improved to some degree our estimates of the risks and partly airlines don’t want to tell customers no on the issue. That said, the experts are pretty sure that there has been or will be at least one air accident due to cell phone use. But that level of risk appears to be acceptable to most people.
So, if your level of acceptable risk is “absolutely no electrical interference with flight systems”, you may want to reconsider taking any flights at all. But if it’s “some interference but very unlikely to matter”, you’re still ok.
ETA: For what it’s worth, I still fly. It’s a risk but so is driving (which is much riskier). Of all the ways to roll the dice, this is a pretty good one, though I’d still generally prefer a bigger margin of safety since there’s no big downside to it.
Hospitals seem to have made the same calculus. It’s impossible to truly police cell phone use, so partly they’ve given up and partly we have a better idea of how much interference to expect. Probably it’ll make a critical difference in some vanishingly small number of cases, but that’s the reality of it right now.
Walkie talkies could certainly interfere with electronics. I recall pressing the talk button while in a control room and seeing the X-Y plotters go crazy.
Dennis
The last time I was in a hospital, I noticed the “no cell” signs still up while all the hospital personnel (and everyone else, including me) were going around blithely using their phones. I decided it was all BS.
I worked on a hospital documentary show filmed 18-19 years ago and the crew had to get special hospital-approved cell phones that wouldn’t interfere with the machinery.
My recent experience is similar, the signs remain but I assume it’s more so the staff can point to something if a patient is being really obnoxious; otherwise they’d police it more heavily (and the staff wouldn’t be on their own phones).
They’re human, too. I wouldn’t be shocked if some, maybe most, still used their phones even if they had direct knowledge they occasionally interfered with equipment. It’s just the way people are.
I was doing hospital IT upgrades from 2011-2014. On the heart telemetry floors, OB, and other areas where patients were actively momitored with various wirelss devices, we were unable to use our cell phones or two-way radios. We were issued the devices that nursing staff utilized to communicate. Vocera and other brands worked pretty good.
We could fire up one of our Motorola radios and watch signals on the floor drop. It could have been a real problem.
Another issue we found was that the devices the staff used flooded the wireless bandwidths so much that our wireless laptops, etc. could not get a signal. We needed to trim the antenas on our wireless devices in order to get cleaner signals.
So the problem was a real one, but I found it to be far more prevelant with devices besides cell tech at the time. All anectdotal, I know…
I can definitely see it being a problem on the telemetry floors.
I still occasionally see stickers on gas pumps warning against using cell phones. Is/ was the idea that they may spark an explosion? I wonder if that’s ever happened.
Nope. Hasn’t happened yet. Probably won’t ever happen.
The most plausible theory that I heard was that an intermittent battery connection could cause a spark which could potentially cause a pump fire. That’s theoretically possible I suppose, but it’s extremely unlikely.
Static electricity, on the other hand, typically causes about half a dozen pump fires per year in the U.S. Considering how many millions of cars fill up every day, that’s a pretty small percentage.
Occasionally you’ll see a news report of a pump fire caused by a cell phone. Static electricity is usually the actual cause. The typical example is a guy has a cell phone in his left hand (held up to his ear) and reaches with his right hand to shut off the pump. When his hand gets close to the nozzle there is a static discharge which ignites the fumes around his hand and causes a fire. But he had a cell phone in his other hand at the time, so the fire gets blamed on the cell phone (initially, at least).
Here’s a previous thread from that era:
It wasn’t a lie. The impact was unknown, and hospitals didn’t want to take the risk that a patient’s care may be impacted and then they might be sued for it.
Look at cell phone usage on planes. There have been no studies to show that cell phone usage even when the plane is in flight will interfere with the controls of the plane. But the FAA and the airlines are still not willing to take that risk.
Well, cell phone usage is allowed during flight, using WiFi and Bluetooth.
I think cellular data is supposed to be turned off, but it’s a moot point anyway, since it’s impossible to receive a cellular signal at altitude.
In the early days of cell phones, they could cause interference to a lot of different things. If you have ever left a cell phone near amplified computer speakers, you will occasionally hear chirping noises come out of the speakers. Those chirps come from radio waves generated by the cell phone causing interference which gets picked up by the speakers and amplified.
It doesn’t take much to make a radio receiver. All you need is something conductive for the antenna (a piece of wire, or even a metal trace on a circuit board) and something that conducts better in one direction than the other (any semiconductor-based device produced today). That’s it. Quite a bit of electronics design is making your device NOT work as a radio receiver. Keeping unwanted interference out of your device can be a challenge.
I have seen manufacturing plants shut down because someone keyed a walkie-talkie near an industrial computer. I know of at least one case where a passenger plane completely lost communication with air traffic control because of a cell phone. A cell phone is a radio transmitter. Radio signals get coupled into electronics devices all the time. It’s not complete BS.
Cell phone users are also stubbornly stupid. It often seems like the best way to guarantee that someone will use a cell phone in a particular area is to hang a sign there saying that cell phone use is prohibited.
So why is it not a problem now? Well, it is, just not as much.
The problem was worse in the old days because a lot of equipment wasn’t designed with cell phones in mind and the equipment wasn’t designed to keep that type of radio noise out of it. But, since cell phone users are stubbornly stupid, everyone else just had to cope. So, all new medical equipment is now subjected to a wide battery of tests specifically to make sure that a cell phone won’t interfere with it. Similarly, modern passenger jets are so well shielded from cell phone radio waves that you’d have a hard time causing any problem with it whatsoever even if you went out of your way to intentionally cause a problem.
Hospitals don’t replace all of their equipment every year, and airlines don’t replace all of their planes, so it has taken a while for all of the old equipment to go away and be replaced by newer, less sensitive equipment. But that’s where we are now.
Also, cell phones have changed. They used to be simple analog radios that would blast out radio waves concentrated on specific frequencies. Modern cell phones are digital, and they tend to splatter their radio waves over a wider range of frequencies, which reduces the chance of any equipment being sensitive to a particular frequency from getting blasted to the point of failure.
So, these days, it’s not much of a problem.
It is important to note that “not much of a problem” and “100 percent safe” do not mean the same thing.
Part of the problem here is that cell phones, even in the old days, did not always cause problems. So, someone uses their cell phone in a hospital and nothing bad happens, or they use their cell phone on a plane and nothing bad happens. Then the user thinks that the whole thing is bunk. The problem is that by the same logic, if you have a room with a thousand pistols in it, and only one pistol has one bullet in it, most people can walk, grab a pistol, spin the cylinder, and have a little fun moment of Russian Roulette. Therefore it is perfectly safe, right? Obviously not. But that is exactly the logic that cell phone users have been using to proclaim that cell phone use on planes and in hospitals is perfectly safe.
Admittedly, even back in the old days, the chances of anyone being harmed by a cell phone were very, very, very small. But the point is, those chances weren’t zero. And even now, the probability is even smaller. But it’s still not zero.
Not impossible. I have flown on private aircraft at lower altitudes and used my cellular data to send texts and emails with no problems.
Yes, it is the static, not the cell phone.
Mythbustersdid a show about this.
Yeah, maybe in a paper airplane, but you are never going to receive a signal at 30,000 feet. The cellular antennas are designed to focus the signal as horizontally as possible, since signal transmitted upward is just wasted. In my experience, my signal drops to zero above 2,500 feet or so.