Not Such an Easy Pill to Swallow

A group of researchers warn of the potential deadly consequences rising from wireless drug delivery

By Joel Barnard Posted 02.09.2009 at 3:19 pm 3 Comments

Wireless Drugs iStockPhoto

The annoying physical exertion associated with lifting a pill to your mouth and washing it down with a Dixie cup full of H20 could soon be history. Much excitement is building around electronic implants that dispense medicines automatically or via a wireless medical network. According to a team of Australian and US researchers, however, remote Intelligent Drug Delivery Systems (RIDDS) are rife with security issues.

RIDDS devices are implanted under the skin and connected wirelessly to a medical control center where healthcare workers can adjust medication frequency or levels as necessary, based either on direct patient observation or sensor outputs. The technology is being created for patients with physical disabilities, learning difficulties, or who are otherwise unable to give themselves medication.

As with any unproven wireless communications technology, RIDDS are open to various hacking and cracking issues, including eavesdropping, jamming, and tampering. And that’s where the researchers caution RIDDS devices could prove deadly. They claim a hacker might intercept data, steal personal information, or even trigger commands to release medication inappropriately and so harm or kill a patient.

Gulp.

Via: EurekAlert

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3 Comments

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taylorhengen

from New York, New York

02/09/09 at 5:27 pm

Scary to imagine what the high end illegal-drug dealers (and their customers) would/will do with this technology.

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billdale

from Los Angeles, CA

02/09/09 at 10:38 pm

Terminal Man, an early novel by best-selling author Michael Crichton, described simple electronic implants designed to control seizures. Despite their apparent foolproof simplicity and efficacy, Crichton's novel predicted that such devices would at first work as intended, but would eventually begin to do the exact opposite-- they would trigger unending, violent seizures.

No doubt if Crichton were alive today, he would perhaps be writing a tale to scare us away from using the device described in this article-- but then again he might just caution us to design in a "fail safe" feature in which it was only physically capable of supplying some safe minimum dose of a drug, so that it could not be responsible for a patient's death or injury. Even malevolent hackers could not do more than interrupt drug delivery; and if anyone or anything overrode its program, the device could perhaps be designed to trigger an alarm and call for help.

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Oakspar77777

02/10/09 at 1:42 pm

Apart from the wireless communication, is this so different than many insulin pumps (and similar devices) already in common useage?