Numerical estimation of EMI impact on implantable cardiac pacemakers in elevator using EMF distributions inside human body

Abstract

In recent years, mobile phone usage has extended to a wide range of environment such as places surrounded by conductive surfaces, e.g., train carriages, elevators, and airplanes. There have been concerns that cellular radio can interfere with different types of devices and increased usage in multi-reflection environments has led to concern about the possible effect of electromagnetic interference (EMI) on implantable medical devices (IMDs). Many experimental studies have been carried out in order to assess the EMI generated by cellular radio in free-space and experienced by IMDs including implantable cardiac pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) [1]-[3]. However, few studies have addressed the effect of EMI on IMDs in elevators. Precise and efficient methods of measuring the electric field (E-field) strength in different regions of multi-reflection environments have not been advanced due to the disturbed fields caused by the presence of measurement equipment and/or human bodies. Therefore, this is achieved by carrying out precise numerical simulations using the Finite-Difference-Time-Domain method [4]. We have already carried out numerical simulations on homogeneous human phantom models and some elevator models to investigate the EMI impact to implantable cardiac pacemakers in elevators; we examined the E-field distribution on the horizontal plane inside elevator [5], outside of human body. In this paper, we introduce our method for estimating pacemaker EMI using EMF distributions inside the region of the human body into which pacemakers are implanted. This enables us to carry out quantitative evaluations of the EMI impact to pacemakers by cellular radio transmission. In order to examine the complex situations where human is present in elevators, our analysis considered a realistically-shaped and anatomically-correct human phantom model. All calculations were run on a supercomputer.