The latest re: wearable tech, a milquetoast-sounding name for a Group 2b carcinogen-emitting/neurotoxic agent.
Adding to the signal smog in the indoor environment is the uBeam, maker of “wireless electricity”. The uBeam promises to charge your “smart” phone in your pocket and other devices without wires!
Meanwhile uBeam’s marketing plan calls for the uBeam to be ubiquitously rolled out in cafes, hotels, malls worldwide. The CEO’s Beta tester, a Harvard graduate asks incredulously “well wouldn’t she know about it if it were dangerous”?
Commentary devoted to the psychosocial underpinnings of “if the Government says it’s safe, it must be okay” will be the subject of future blog posts although it is touched on towards the end of this post:
Meanwhile, reader comments in the New York Times about uBeam tell it like it is:
DOBES
NYC 6 August 2014
Has anyone examined the effect of all this sound bouncing around and being converted to electrical current on health? Will anyone study that before it is released? How about environmental effects? There needs to be more to a product than convenience to make it worth using.
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MCE
Wash DC 7 August 2014
Does anyone know what being inside that acoustic field does to organs like the retina, the cornea, the cochlea, the thyroid, or anything close to the surface… Even it were spread spectrum so that any resonances are time scattered… I definitely do not want it in a public space like an airport. If one wants to install an acoustic field generator in their home, that is fine. The FDA ought to be looking very closely at this. It’s essentially a room size lithotrypsy machine…
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mikenh
Nashua, N.H.7 August 2014
Just another example of letting the lazy and online-addicted among us who make the rest of us suffer the likely health effects from a system that has no business being in a public venue
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Ken
San Rafael11 August 2014
Looks like they are using piezoelectric crystals which can turn sound waves into electric current. However, some of the later posters have noted that the strength of the beam is inversely proportional to the distance, no not sure I want a beam strong enough to charge my phone while it is in my pocket…even though the phone by itself is probably doing enough damage…
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As with Wi-Fi, phones, towers, Bluetooth, smart meters, etc.everything can (and should) be measured with a meter to have an accurate representation of what the emissions are. While the uBeam is unlikely to be giving people anywhere near the intensity of a lithotripsy, shock waves and ultrasound are not exactly the same thing, and the ultrasound does not go through the walls (although the RF from the transducer likely could), MCE’s comment brings to mind a few points:
1) Cumulatively, someone around a uBeam constantly will have more exposure over time that one or even several equivalent exposures in a therapeutic context.
2) How close one is to the device will be a major determiner of dose (power output is a factor, but less so than distance).
3) There are studies linking repeated high doses of ultrasound to ALS in athletes; the Open Letter to Phillips Exeter Academy discusses continual low dose being an issue of cumulativity as well as the fact that there are power density windows in which a lower power density of a continual signal can trigger worse symptoms than an equivalent higher power density short burst.
and
4) All of these devices that have been allowed to be rolled out onto the market are exposing people to radiofrequency (especially microwave) radiation, ultrasound, etc. that people who are sick get in therapeutic settings, albeit at a lower, but continual or continuously intermittent dose. One wouldn’t gratuitously take a treatment if one were healthy and didn’t need it….Where were the analyses that show where the Mason-Dixon line is where these agents no longer have major biological effects and are suddenly not medical treatments, but are acceptable emissions in the public square? They don’t exist (discussed in legal review article in the Consumer Law and Policy Blog). Worse, there are plenty of studies that show that the publicly allowable levels- at least for the wireless radiation– are higher than those that cause severe biological effects.
The case is there for Wi-Fi that there is no safe level (stated by members of various government agencies in the Open Letter and effectively acknowledged by various agencies re: the existence of the access issue and the no-guidelines-for-long-term-exposure-past-30 minutes-issue) and for the other devices and transmitters there is always a biological effect. Given the studies mentioned in 3) above, the same issue is likely to exist with ultrasound.
To the Beta Tester’s point which is, shouldn’t somebody know about this? Let’s return to my comment about the FCC and Chairman Wheeler. Headhunters in the tech space quietly say that there are rumblings amongst engineers in Silicon Valley that there is a problem because many of them are getting symptoms from working in high power-density wireless environment all day, but most mid-level executives, engineers, investors, etc. are aware or have read the documents cited in the Open Letter (or performed that analysis).
There is no doubt that FCC Chair Tom Wheeler has a fairly good idea of what is going on, inasmuch as when he was head of the CTIA, he asked the lead investigator of the studies commissioned by the industry through a CRADA with the government not to report the findings of double-strand DNA breaks, acoustic neuroma increases, etc. from cell-phone exposure that were found in 1994.
When Wheeler went with the President to a school in Maryland in February to assert that Wi-Fi should be in every school ($2b was released from an FCC fund for this purpose in July), it can only be said that the President, who prides himself on being practical and tech-savvy, does not have any advisors around him that are asking the right questions. It would be surprising if he even knew about the Israeli Supreme Court’s conditional injunction on the use of Wi-Fi in schools…..