8 ms·
Oxygen monitors are standard practice when you have MRI machines and Helium cooling. I would like to assume that this monitoring was in place and it never raise
by varenc 8y ago
Oxygen monitors are standard practice when you have MRI machines and Helium cooling. I would like to assume that this monitoring was in place and it never raised any flags? https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/helium-mri-rooms-around-world/ https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/helium-mri-rooms-around-w...
The air’s usual O2 concentration is ~20.5% and it looks like safety monitors trigger at 19.5% and 18%: https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/all-categories-gas-monitorsair-check-o2-oxygen-deficiency-monitor-for-co2-n2-storage-areas/ https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/all-categories-gas-monito...
Helium makes up less than 0.0005% of air naturally. I’m guessing that increasing He concentration 1000 times to 0.5%, for example, is enough to cause problems for iPhones, but not enough to trigger the alarm or pose any danger to people.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Novashi 8y agoOr the O2 alarms just don't work and the hospital was negligent.
- na85 8y agoOccam's razor.
- gotocake 8y agoNot enough to directly endanger people, but a hospital is full of electronics that plenty of people need to live, and it sounds like they could potentially share the iPhone’s vulnerability.
- rpcastagna 8y agoIf it makes you feel better: Hospitals of reasonable size typically have an on-site clinical engineering team that handles those kinds of situations. Important (that is, capital expense category) hospital equipment will typically emit all kinds of warnings and alarms way before anything's actually a problem, because everyone would rather rely on the on-site engineering spending a little extra time silencing false positives then leave anything to chance.
- dbcurtis 8y agoAll the nursing journals are full of articles about combating “alarm fatigue”. After 1 google query and 2 minutes of link-clicking: > “An analysis of alarms at The John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, revealed a total of more than 59 000 alarm conditions over a 12-day period-or 350 alarms per patient per day.1,2” https://www.nursingcenter.com/journalarticle?Article_ID=1617134&Journal_ID=230572&Issue_ID=1616941 https://www.nursingcenter.com/journalarticle?Article_ID=1617... Alarms are mostly ignored or turned off.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoIf you spend any time in an emergency room or a hospital, you'll soon realize that there's almost always an alarm going off somewhere, usually more than one and usually for long periods of time.
- lostlogin 8y ago> Hospitals of reasonable size typically have an on-site clinical engineering team that handles those kinds of situations. Not for superconducting magnets they don’t. They may be involved with MR scanners somewhere, but that would be extremely uncommon.
- rtkwe 8y agoIt's not an issue for most equipment though because it's only really the MEMS type oscillator that is sensitive to this type of gas intrusion. It's a very new type of clock and most other devices don't use them so there's basically zero risk.
- all_blue_chucks 8y agoUnfortunately the O2 sensors were being monitored by an iPad.
- jsjohnst 8y agoConsidering that Trimix and Heliox used in deep commercial dives can have the majority (Aka >50%) of the breathable “air” be helium, your theory that there’s really any risk of danger to people seems a bit unwarranted to me.
- brianpgordon 8y agoHelium isn't toxic but it displaces oxygen. Heliox still contains enough oxygen to breathe (at sea level it's 21% oxygen just like normal atmosphere, and when diving the partial pressure of oxygen is the same as oxygen in normal atmosphere). But if you release helium into a room full of air, patients with already-compromised respiratory systems from injury or from respiratory diseases or from opioid painkillers could be at risk for brain damage or death if they were borderline already and not being monitored closely enough. The author's cavalier "I bet the nurse’s voices were higher pitched that day!" was incredibly inappropriate given the potential danger.
- nradov 8y agoHospital rooms aren't hermetically sealed. Helium dissipates so quickly that this isn't a realistic safety concern.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jsjohnst 8y ago> Helium isn't toxic but it displaces oxygen. While technically correct in theory, in any real world environment Helium will not displace Oxygen unless you are dumping orders of magnitude more helium than in this scenario. > Heliox still contains enough oxygen to breathe (at sea level it's 21% oxygen just like normal atmosphere, and when diving the partial pressure of oxygen is the same as oxygen in normal atmosphere). There’s so much wrong with this (and the rest of your post) I can’t think of a polite way to respond, so I’ll just wish you a good day.
- nradov 8y agoBreathing helium is completely safe as long as the oxygen concentration is near normal. Hospitals have occasionally even put patients with respiratory disorders on helium/oxygen breathing mixtures because the work of breathing is slightly lower than air.
- jsjohnst 8y agoIt used to be the most common treatment for asthma patients in fact.
- varenc 8y agoAgreed! The only risk is that if you did release a massive amount of helium in an enclosed space, it could displace enough oxygen to drop the O2 concentration to dangerous levels. That's why it seems like oxygen concentration monitors are a good idea for hospitals with liquid He. They don't really need to monitor helium levels since that's not the direct cause of problems. It's only an issue (but a big issue) if there's so much He released that it displaces enough air to meaningfully dilute O2 concentrations.
- pankajdoharey 8y agoHelium is much lighter than Nitrogen and Oxygen and may not displace them rather it will float at the top of the room or escape to the atmosphere quite easily. Though if it were Carbon Di'oxide it would have been a different story.
- isoprophlex 8y agoThis is completely wrong. You're neglecting gas mixing and the entropy gain of solution. Our atmosphere does not contain mostly O2 and N2 in the middle, with a layer of CO2, Ar, etcetera near the surface. The sugar in a bottle of coke does not spontaneously sink to the bottom.
- joosteto 8y agoSugar in coke doesn't sink to the bottom, indeed, but if you put a sugar cube in water, it first sinks to the bottom, and then (slowly) dissolves. Likewise, if you release helium in air, it goes up first, and then (quickly) dissolves in the air.