Forensic Significance of Cardiac Implantable Device (Pacemaker)

Authors

  • Anju Bhatt  Student, M.Sc., Forensic Science, Institute of Forensic Science, Mumbai ,Certified Ethical Hacker-EC Council USA
  • Vaishali Ajugiya  Student, M.Sc., Forensic Science, Institute of Forensic Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
  • Deepika Bhandari  Assitant Professor, Department of Forensic Science, Institute of Forensic Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
  • Neeta Khobragade  Assitant Professor, Department of Digital and Cyber Forensics, Institute of Forensic Science, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

DOI:

https://doi.org//10.32628/IJSRSET196369

Keywords:

Pacemaker, Digital Evidence, Forensic, Admissibility.

Abstract

Pacemakers are automated electric medical devices that are imbibed in the pleural cavity near to heart so as to stimulate the heart with electrical inducement to maintain or restore a normal heartbeat. Pacemakers can be implanted temporarily to treat bradycardia after a heart attack, surgery or overdose of medication. They can also be implanted permanently to correct a slow heartbeat or, in some cases, to help treat heart failure. With increase in pacemaker indications and especially implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, the number of patients with implantable devices has been growing steadily. With the enhancement in the technology the design of pacemakers are being modified till date. Pacemakers being an electronic device also stores data of patient’s heartrate, pulse rate and number of time it has paced in a day. Since, technology is killing our opportunity to falsify the information; the data stored in the pacemaker can either support or reject the alibi stated by the victim or assailant. The aim of this research paper is to study the concept and type of digital data stored in implantable cardiac device i.e. pacemaker. This study focuses on awareness about the application of pacemaker in solving forensic cases. Digital data provided by the pacemaker in any ongoing investigation will have a huge evidentiary potential, as it can be made admissible in the court of law under Section 65-B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. In this paper, we are recommending that pacemakers can be used as digital evidences since, they track the audit trails of the patient.

References

  1. Basso, C., Aguilera, B., Banner, J., Cohle, S., d’Amati, G., de Gouveia, R. H., di Gioia, C., Fabre, A., Gallagher, P.J., Leone, O. & Lucena, J. (2017). Guidelines for autopsy investigation of sudden cardiac death: 2017 update from the Association for European Cardiovascular Pathology. Virchows Archiv, 471(6), 691-705.
  2. Bissett, J. K., & Matin, Z. (1908). Advances in Pacemaker Electrogram Recording and Storage of Arrhythmias: The Silent Witness for Clinicians. Sat, 1, 47pm.
  3. Burri, H., & Senouf, D. (2009). Remote monitoring and follow-up of pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators. Europace, 11(6), 701-709.
  4. Chi, H., Wu, L., Du, X., Zeng, Q., & Ratazzi, P. (2018, May). e-SAFE: secure, efficient and forensics-enabled access to implantable medical devices. In 2018 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS) (pp. 1-9). IEEE.
  5. Cusack, B., & Kyaw, A. K. (2012). Forensic readiness for wireless medical systems.
  6. Ellouze, N., Rekhis, S., Allouche, M., & Boudriga, N. (2014). Digital investigation of security attacks on cardiac implantable medical devices. arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.4303.
  7. Grant, M. E., & Hanson, J. S. (1975). A totally computerized cardiac pacemaker surveillance system. Computers and Biomedical Research, 8(6), 580-589.
  8. Indian Evidence Act (1872) Bare Act, Eastern Book Company, Lucknow
  9. Kirkpatrick, J. N., Ghani, S. N., Burke, M. C., & Knight, B. P. (2007). Postmortem interrogation and retrieval of implantable pacemakers and defibrillators: a survey of morticians and patients. Journal of cardiovascular electrophysiology, 18(5), 478-482.
  10. Lacour, P., Buschmann, C., Storm, C., Nee, J., Parwani, A. S., Huemer, M., Attanasio, P., Boldt, L.H., Rauch, G., Kucher, A. & Pieske, B. (2018). Cardiac implantable electronic device interrogation at forensic autopsy: an underestimated resource? Circulation, 137(25), 2730-2740.
  11. Lindqvist, P. (2005). Compression and storage of medical data in pacemakers. Master's Thesis, Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden.
  12. Middletown,OH. Man's pacemaker data used against him in arson case.( 2017, February 11). CBSNEWS. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com
  13. SANDERS, R., MARTIN, R., FRUMIN, H., & GOLDBERG, M. J. (1984). Data storage and retrieval by implantable pacemakers for diagnostic purposes. Pacing and Clinical Electrophysiology, 7(6), 1228-1233.
  14. Schuchert, A., Lepage, S., Ostrander, J. J., Bos, R. J., Gwechenberger, M., Nicholls, A., & Ringwald, G. (2005). Automatic analysis of pacemaker diagnostic data in the identification of atrial tachyarrhythmias in patients with no prior history of them. EP Europace, 7(3), 242-247.
  15. Shi, W. V., & Zhou, M. (2011, April). Recent advances of sensors for pacemakers. In 2011 International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control (pp. 520-525). IEEE.
  16. The Information Technology Act (2000) Bare Act, Asia Law House, Hyderabad.

International Journal of Scientific Research in Science, Engineering and Technology

Downloads

Published

2019-06-30

Issue

Volume 6, Issue 3, May-June-2019

Section

Research Articles

License

Copyright (c) IJSRSET

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

[1]
Anju Bhatt, Vaishali Ajugiya, Deepika Bhandari, Neeta Khobragade, " Forensic Significance of Cardiac Implantable Device (Pacemaker), International Journal of Scientific Research in Science, Engineering and Technology(IJSRSET), Print ISSN : 2395-1990, Online ISSN : 2394-4099, Volume 6, Issue 3, pp.340-345, May-June-2019. Available at doi : https://doi.org/10.32628/IJSRSET196369