This is an article from ZDNet by Jo Best that I don't fully understand -- though I get the point of it well-enough that I'm utterly fascinated by it. It's about medicine and technology, and how one of the impressive things about their future is also one of the most problematic -- how being able to collect data on a patient remotely (like those with pacemakers) and provide diagnostics is also fraught with risks due to hacking, since when you send anything by remote, it has the possibility of that data being read by those who shouldn't have access. The hacking has to be done reasonably near by, within about 30 yards, but in a medical facility that could be most anybody. However (and this is the utterly fascinating part, even if I don't have the technology exactly right), when there is a wire connecting servers it's more difficult to intercept -- one would have to be within centimeters -- and researcher's at Lafayette's Purdue University have recently found that one way to accomplish this is for the person with the implanted device to basically be the "conduit" themselves! Sensors would be attached to the patients and the signal would be routed through their body, "which dramatically cuts the distance over which any data can be read." What the researchers have developed is a way to keep the signal completely within the body.
As I said, I have no idea how this actually works or why. The article goes into meta-details which meant nothing to me, but skimming to the readable parts was able to get across the basics. Including that the technology not only helps prevent hacking, but is actually much more efficient which has its own benefits. "'When you take information and put it onto electromagnetic carriers to communicate, which is what we do with our wireless technology -- Bluetooth, 5G -- you take a lot of energy because you have to generate that high-frequency electromagnetic wave...' Dr Shreyas Sen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, tells ZDNet. "'When you communicate over a wire,' Dr. Sen continued, 'it's 1000x more efficient. We started exploring how we might use the human body as a wire -- bringing the wireline kind of techniques into the human body to make it act like a wire. It really created interest in this technology.' "That means EQS-HBC has a practical advantage over wireless body networks: less energy demand means longer battery life for any implantable devices using the network. And a longer battery life means such devices won't need replacing as often -- for someone with a pacemaker, that could add up to a whole lot fewer invasive surgeries over their lifetime. There's a great deal more in the article that's worth reading -- even if (like me) you can't grasp it all (like talk about nanojoules and picojoules, and that's some of the easy part...). However, that's why God created skimming, and it's very simple to get through it all and come away with a lot that way. You can find the whole article here.
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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