CNet, April 28, 2008
By Anne Broache

About a decade ago, wireless heart monitors hooked to patients at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas went on the fritz, causing much scrambling among the building's engineering team.

The culprit, as it turned out, was interference from a nearby broadcast television station, which was testing its digital signal on the same channel where some of the medical devices operated, as detailed in the journal Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology a few years ago. The Federal Communications Commission ultimately cordoned off spectrum just for that purpose, although migrating there was largely voluntary.

Now, hospital administrators and medical device manufacturers fear similar problems could happen again if federal regulators don't place limits on requests by Google, Microsoft, and other high-tech companies to free up spectrum "white spaces" between television channels.

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