Apple’s warning to keep the iPhone 12 away from heart devices due to electromagnetic interference was further underscored by U.S. cardiologists this week in a new report (via NBC25 News).
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Apple’s iPhone 12 series includes a plethora of magnets that help align the phone with Apple’s MagSafe charging accessory to maximize charging, and Apple already advises users with pacemakers and implanted defibrillators to keep iPhone accessories and agMagSafe access at a safe distance from these devices.
To check the extent of the risk, recently Cardiologist Gurjit Singh, a cardiologist at the Henry Ford Institute and Vascular, and colleagues conducted subsequent tests to see what influence Apple products have.
According to Dr. Singh, more than 300,000 people in the U.S. undergo surgery to implant one of these devices each year and about one in four smartphones sold last year was an “iPhone 12”. Cardiac devices have switches that respond to an external magnet to change the operation of the device, allowing them to be controlled without the need for surgery.
Curious about possible interference with electrical devices, Dr. Singh and colleagues grabbed an iPhone 12 Pro and passed it over a patient’s chest with an implantable defibrillator.
“When we brought the iPhone closer to the patient’s chest, the defibrillator went off,” Dr. Singh said. “We saw the external defibrillator programmer that the device’s functions were suspended and left suspended. When we removed the phone from the patient’s chest, the defibrillator immediately returned to its normal function.”
“We were all blown away,” he said. “We had assumed the magnet would be too weak on a phone to fire the defibrillator’s magnetic switch.”
The findings are significant, as Dr. Singh is an expert at using devices such as implantable defibrillators that detect an irregular heartbeat and cause the heart to return to a normal rhythm and pacemakers to use electricity to keep the heart beating. Following the discovery, Dr. Singh and his colleagues immediately sent a report of their findings to the HeartRhythm medical journal that was published on January 4, 2021.
“We believe that our findings have important large-scale implications for people who live with these devices on a daily basis, who, without thinking about it, will place the phone in their shirt pocket, top pocket or coat, not knowing that it can cause the defibrillator or pacemaker to function in a potentially lethal manner. “
The comments highlight medical evidence published in January warning that iPhone 12 models and related MagSafe devices can “inhibit life-saving therapy in a patient” due to magnetic interference with implanted medical devices. Apple provides more information about this issue in the “Important Safety Information for iPhone” section of the iPhone User Guide.