Pacemaker or Death Sentence?

          The world of technology in medicine has been expanding very recently to explore many new innovations.  One of the relatively new advances is the alteration in pacemakers.  Pacemakers now have the ability to be rebooted, altered and to transmit data about the patient it works for to his or her doctor.  With an advancement like this, one must question the safety of such power.  This modernization to the pacemaker has reduced the need for surgery on patients who require a pacemaker but at what cost?

          The job of a pacemaker is to send electrical pulses to the heart to regulate tachycardia and bradycardia arrhythmia.  An arrhythmia is a condition in which the heart beats slower (tachycardia) or faster (bradycardia) than the regular beat of an unaffected heart.  In the past, doctors had to use surgical meand to access the pacemaker.  With the new technology available, Surgery to change the pacemaker is no longer necessary which ultimately eliminates all the complications and risks of surgery.  Unfortunately, the wireless, data emitting pacemakers, are not the protected as strongly as they should be. 

          Barnaby Jack, a professional hacker who made it his mission in life to exploit faults in technological systems, proved that the new innovated pacemakers are not safe from hackers such as himself.  Barnaby proved that he could hack into a pacemaker and send an electrical impulse strong enough to put a heart into fibrillation and ultimately death.  Although the hacker has to be close enough to the patient to wirelessly reach the pacemaker, who would be able to ensure the people around him or her are not trying to hack his or her pacemaker.  How could someone like Arnold Palmer, a famous golfer who has a pacemaker ever feel safe being watched by millions of people?  Someone can hack right into his pacemaker and never be caught.

          Besides the obvious life threatening consequence of altering electrical pulses in a pacemaker, what information can anyone steal from the pacemaker all together?  If a pacemaker is sending information to another piece of technology, we have to ask, who else has access to this information?  Is it just the doctors treating the patient?  The company who supplied the technology to the doctors?  Is the information being sold to other companies?  With privacy becoming a hot topic of conversation and debate, we must ensure that the data from a pacemaker cannot be reached from outside the inner circle of select doctors.

          Many advances in the medical filed have saved countless lives and continue to do so but,  with new technological innovations, it is the job of the inventor to test the security of such devices.  Especially in the world of medicine, it is imperative that inventions are rigorously tested, more-so than any other field of technology.  Technology in medicine is risky because any fault can result in the death of another person.  No other field of technology has the pressures of medicine.  It is the responsibility to medical engineers to ensure the safety and privacy of their devices before making them available to the general population for use.