This sounds like a ridiculous question, the very idea that
Apple
's iPad might turn off people's heart defibrillators, but it does seem to be true. The problem, as minor as it is, is that the casing contains magnets designed to hold on any cover that the owner might wish to use. Those magnets can indeed interfere with defibrillators.
That magnets can do this is well known: it's standard advice to people with them to make sure that they don't place magnets close to hte devices. But until now no one had actually tested, formally, the iPad. As a result of what may well be one of the great school science projects, we now know the answer: yes, there is indeed the possibility of interference.
Chien, a high school freshman in Stockton, California, tested 19 volunteers who had heart devices fitted.
Of those 19 patients, 16 had ICDs, two had pacemakers, and one had a loop recorder fitted.
They were all asked to hold the second generation iPad at reading distance.
They were then told to mimic falling asleep with the second generation iPad resting on their chest.
The study found that 'magnet mode' - a mode which disables the heart device's built-in defribillator - was triggered in 18.8 percent of patients who put the tablet on their chest.
As long as you're not actually hugging the iPad to your chest there's no problem: and the advice from both Apple and the defibrillator manufacturers is that you shouldn't do that anyway.
The reason this happens is interesting. The defibrillators are actually designed to be turned off by magnets. Given that they are implants into the body you do want to have some method of switching them on and or off without having to hack into the chest cavity each time. And magnetism is one of those lovely forces that will indeed work through human tissue without disrupting it. Thus the use of magnetism as that on/off switch. This very minor problem them arises because other people are using magnets to do something entirely different: keep the cover on a computer tablet. The problem would also occur with any other form of magnet applied to the same area of the body: it's most certainly not exclusive to iPads.
The real meaning of this story though is something entirely different. It's a pretty good world where high school freshmen are actually doing real science experiments, isn't it?
