It seems now that Furby, a stuffed toy with a computer chip inside, which was vilified for interfering with medical equipment, does not affect medical machinery after all. An investigation by Health Canada (the government's health ministry), published recently in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (1999; 161:971), revealed that the electric and magnetic fields given off by the ear wiggling, eye blinking, fuzzy creature are about 70 times weaker than those emitted by a digital telephone and are “very unlikely” to affect the performance of medical devices, say the study's authors.
The furry furor started last January, when Canadian media outlets jumped on reports that the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, Scotland, had apparently banned the toy from its intensive care unit. No Canadian hospitals barred visitors bearing the creature.
In response to media coverage and calls from biomedical engineers, researchers in Health Canada's Medical Devices Bureau measured the effect of Furby on 10 devices made before 1993 and known to be vulnerable to interference from cellular phones. These included incubators, automatic external defibrillators, syringe pumps, infusion pumps, electrocardiogram monitors, ventilators, renal dialysis machines, and pacemakers.
Three other machines (the Holter monitor, an anesthetic system, and an ultrasound system) produced before 1996 were also studied because of concerns about possible susceptibility to electrical interference.
Furby was given a clean bill of electromagnetic health, as it did not adversely affect the functioning of any of the devices tested at any distance. While the chattering creature did generate electric and magnetic fields in its active mode (it awakens from hibernation in response to sound and light), these were too weak to pose any threat to hospital equipment.
Dr Kok-Swang Tan of Health Canada admits that during the testing he did get some “strange looks from colleagues who wondered why I was playing with a Furby in front of medical devices.”
Figure 1.
Furby: innocent of all charges of interference