My anxiety has lessened with time, but still the question nags at me, settling into a more ambient concern. I no longer

My hesitance over engaging with it retreats and returns like this in cycles. Some doctors have argued that overpublicizing negative information about medical devices unnecessarily adds to hysteria in a way that affects patient compliance. “You have to make sure that the reaction to [a problem like hacking] doesn’t introduce more risk than the potential for a problem,” Dr. Saxon told me. Removing a problematic device, for example, reintroduces all the standard risks of surgery.,There’s already some evidence that connected cardiac devices are being overprescribed, perhaps due to the positive bias the devices can engender in doctors and manufacturers. A 2011 study in JAMA found that in a population of more than 100,000 ICD patients, more than one-fifth received an ICD without meeting the standard clinical guidelines for implantation. Many of them had never experienced any kind of ventricular arrhythmia.,The timeworn credo of medicine is “first, do no harm.” It’s hardly a fast rule anymore, but the principle comes into sharp relief when discussing the danger posed by medical devices. Doctors and manufacturers often take a statistical approach when discussing the cost-benefit relationship of these devices: Real harm is minuscule, comparatively. ICDs save lives all the time, so that justifies their use. But this gets the principle completely backwards. The question is not supposed to be will this patient get sicker if you don’t intervene, but rather, will someone get sicker if you do?,Of course, motivations for using the Raspberry Pi can vary. You may need an inexpensive Linux desktop for learning. You may not have the money for a full-fledged PC. I have long wanted a 100% silent and low-power computer to use as a media center and “typewriter.” Using the power-consuming 500W Core I7 desktop PC just to type this text seems a bit redundant for me, at least in terms of reducing the energy footprint. (I don’t care about the electricity bill; I care about the environment.) I tried using Samsung DeX as a desktop, and the experience was generally very positive — for typing and watching videos on the big screen, my Samsung Galaxy S10 is powerful enough. But the Android software that can work in desktop mode is limited, and not every website displays correctly using Android in desktop mode with a mouse. And DeX is still Android, with many limitations of the smartphone-based operating system. Linux is another matter — complete freedom in terms of SSH access, installing any libraries, components, a fully functional terminal, USB, GPIO, and hardware support. Sounds promising. Let’s see how it works.,I have had my ICD for nearly four years now. In that time, it has never once shocked me. I should feel relieved that the device has not yet gone off, but instead, the longer it sits inside my body without having saved my life, the more I think about the device’s ability to end it. Much of my experience of the health care system has been one of escalating calamity: The solution to one problem invariably causes an even bigger one. Even my very first pacemaker seems linked inextricably to the fact that I later became eligible for an ICD: About 10 months into living with it, I developed an arrhythmia that my doctors later determined was somehow caused by interference from the pacemaker itself. The heart surgeries I’ve had over the years have contributed to a layer of scar tissue on my heart that predisposed me—and likely contributed to—the incident that led to the ICD. When it comes to the security of the ICD itself, it’s less an absolute question of whether the costs outweigh the benefits and more a philosophical one. Not only do I feel less safe, but I am now also acutely aware of the ways in which I might have been destined to end up at this point, tracing the steps that led me here back through the maze of treatment.,Note from Towards Data Science’s editors: While we allow independent authors to publish articles in accordance with our rules and guidelines, we do not endorse each author’s contribution. You should not rely on an author’s works without seeking professional advice. See our Reader Terms for details.,What’s worse is that the rapid normalization of people willing to pair their medical data, health monitoring, and disease management to the internet in some ways perpetuates itself. Connected medical devices like pacemakers, ICDs, and continuous glucose monitors for diabetes management, as well as commercial wellness products like fitness wearables, create a flywheel effect that amplifies further use on both sides. Before medical and health IoT devices took off, people generally went to the doctor when they felt unwell. Now people are also going to the doctor when they feel fine but a machine is telling them something is wrong. Diagnostic cardiac tools, for example, like the Apple Watch’s arrhythmia detection, have the potential to drive more people into the health care system and could end up helping to increase the population of cardiac device users.,Since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4, a lot more people have been trying to use this microcomputer as their desktop PC. More recently, the Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer has been released, the name of which directly indicates its “main” purpose. I have long been interested in the possibility of using a portable and silent PC for simple tasks like creating this text, where the full-size desktop is redundant and the tablet is inconvenient. Finally, I bought a top-of-the-line Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of memory. It’s time to see how it works.,“There is a rising challenge in terms of making sure it’s secure, because some of these devices are, you know, it’s a huge marketplace, there’s a rush to get products out,” said Aerts of commercial medical tech. “Companies either aren’t always willing to invest the time and money it takes to build security into those products or they are new to the marketplace and just don’t understand it.”,But it’s hardly just the threat of hacking that worries me. It’s a feeling instead of living as a guinea pig for an opaque set of private interests, and a feeling that I can’t trust an industry that would ever put unsecure devices inside patients in the first place.,This year, my doctor mentioned that their office hadn’t received a transmission from my ICD in a while. When I got home, I reluctantly pulled the monitor out from my closet and plugged it in by my dresser. I began the process of pairing the monitor with the device in my chest, but the monitor was having trouble connecting to my Wi-Fi. I tried it a second time, and then a third: A startup sequence ended in a flashing red light. I stopped trying to pair the devices. I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling as if, even momentarily, I’d regained control over myself, and put the monitor back into the closet.,Like a good mentee I took the time to understand why. My mentor took me out to lunch one day at the cafe next to our office. They were accepting a new shiny orange currency as payment: Bitcoin.,This year, my doctor mentioned that their office hadn’t received a transmission from my ICD in a while. When I got home, I reluctantly pulled the monitor out from my closet and plugged it in by my dresser. I began the process of pairing the monitor with the device in my chest, but the monitor was having trouble connecting to my Wi-Fi. I tried it a second time, and then a third: A startup sequence ended in a flashing red light. I stopped trying to pair the devices. I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling as if, even momentarily, I’d regained control over myself, and put the monitor back into the closet.,It’s tacitly accepted, especially in health care, that this continued development naturally means improvement; that the further we get from the early 20th-century days of unsterile surgery, from the time before anesthesia and antibiotics, the safer our medicine becomes. But instead, by entangling medicine with the Wild West–like tech industry, the medical IoT poses a new suite of therapies meant to save lives that can also be hacked and sabotaged to endanger them.,It was 10% cheaper to pay for my sandwich with Bitcoin than it was with dollars. The problem was buying Bitcoin was a pain in the butt. You needed to have a digital wallet and it was easy to lose your coins. My mentor bought some coins and paid for my lunch. I paid him back in dollars.