Who's in the debate?

While preparing this issue's cover story, "RF unlocked," pg 42, I learned about many more applications for intermachine communication than I could possibly describe in a single article. Among the product-development efforts that captured my imagination were several that are adapting these technologies to clinical settings for both in-hospital and outpatient services.

For example, diagnostic equipment that reports test results directly into the patient-record database doesn't just minimize the chance of an occasional misreading or transcription error. Its real benefit is in immediately making data available to the network. The physicians, pharmacy, consulting specialists, nursing staff, and supervisors can access the information when and where it does the most good for efficient, quality patient care. Wireless technologies allow small, portable devices to stay connected to the network without sacrificing patient mobility—often an important factor in a patient's recovery.

Advances from the semiconductor industry, such as small, inexpensive, and accurate fingerprint sensors and RFID tags, can also help clinicians ensure patient identity, particularly important when direct communication with patients is impaired and in cases where staff must transport patients between sites or between units within a facility.

Of course, other uses for these devices are gaining notice. As the technologies advance—reducing power, size, and cost and increasing range, speed, and robustness—questions and fears are mounting among consumers. You remember them. They likely comprise the one segment in your business still doing business.

Technological developments reported at this year's ISSCC include two seemingly innocuous papers. "Enabling technologies for disappearing electronics in smart textiles" from an Infineon Technologies team describes methods of embedding electronic devices, connecting them through copper conductors woven into textile products, and encapsulating them robustly enough to withstand normal wear, washing, and drying cycles. In another presentation, Hitachi engineers describe a passive RFID transmitter chip less than 12 mils on a side fabricated in 180-nm CMOS. The small die requires no precision alignment for assembly because the only two external connections—for an external antenna that coincidentally you can form from copper wire—terminate on the opposite faces of the 60-micron-thick chip.

These two papers describe an inexpensive RFID-tag system that manufacturers can embed in clothing; those who purchase or wear these garments might be unable to detect these tags. Privacy-rights advocates are already twitching about the extent to which manufacturers, retailers, and the government are calling on technology to monitor individual behaviors (references 1 and 2).

For the government's part, since the attack on New York's World Trade Towers, President George W Bush's administration has gone far beyond sniffing our shoes at airports. Critics of the Total Information Awareness project and the Homeland Security Act point out that both are designed to trade liberty for safety—historically, an impossible exchange.

Indeed, the history of the previous century makes one thing clear: Democracy is not static. As much as technology has changed our home lives and workplaces, it can also alter the social agreement that underlies our political system. Yet, the technical community is rarely heard in this or any other public-policy debate. The general populace is left to filter the various messages from government, commercial interests, and self-appointed watchdogs including the popular press—none of whom have a good track record when it comes to clearly and candidly describing technology, its capability, or its limitations.

I'm left wondering if we can be sanguine about technology's ethical neutrality, or do we have a moral obligation—both as knowledgeable members of the technical community and as responsible members of the electorate—to participate? Alternatively, if you prefer appeals to self-interest, one might ask how much one should expect consumers to trust a group that withholds information relevant to their concerns. Is this the way we want to treat our best customers? What do you think? E-mail me at joshua@edn.com subject line: debate.