New York, USA (CU)_ Apple’s iPhone 12 series features a set of magnets that help align the phone to improve charging on Apple’s MagSafe charging adapter. Apple has already suggested consumers with embedded pacemakers and defibrillators to hold iPhone and MagSafe accessories away from those devices at a safe distance.
When in operation, all electronic devices produce electromagnetic fields, but the iPhone 12 series is unusual where it actually has magnets within it. These are used to support the latest generation of MagSafe wireless charging of Apple, but they may also have some impact on magnetism-based objects and devices nearby. Apple has also issued an alert about the electromagnetic interference of phones, but emphasized that it holds no more risk than any other iPhone before it, something that cardiologists have found might not be the case.
Last month, cardiologist Gurjit Singh and his team at the Henry Ford Heart and Vascular Institute released a report and have now disclosed their findings about the iPhone 12 that could raise further concerns, especially for users embedded with medical devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators. Sadly, merely running an iPhone 12 over the chest of a patient may already have harmful consequences.
The findings of the doctors’ experiments say that the iPhone 12 disabled the defibrillator just by passing over it. It could trigger the system to send an electrical charge in the case of a pacemaker to make the heart go out of sync. In reality, these devices are built to be regulated by magnets so that doctors don’t have to operate on patients for that reason again and again.
The statistics that the doctors show increase the stakes even higher. Dr. Singh says each year around 300,000 individuals in the US are implanted with these devices. With the news that iPhone 12 was one out of four phones sold last year, the odds of these phones ending up in individuals with medical devices implanted are also high.
