Portable music players such as the iPod won't cause electronic interference in implanted heart pacemakers, a new study claims.

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration preformed tests on a variety of iPods and showed they did not produce enough of an electromagnetic field to interfere with the devices. Four different models of the iPods were measured, namely the fourth-generation iPod, iPod with video, iPod shuffle and iPod nano.

Based on the observations of our in-vitro study, we conclude that no interference can occur in pacemakers exposed to the iPods we tested, wrote U.S. Food and Drug Administration researcher Howard Bassen and his colleagues in the BioMedical Engineering OnLine.

Bassen said they used a 3-coil sensor, the team measured the magnetic field produced by the iPod at a distance of around 5 to 10 millimeters. They obtained readings for the magnetic field at various specific and small regions 10 mm from an iPod. The peak magnetic field strength was 0.2 millionths of a Tesla, a value hundreds of times lower than the levels capable of interfering with a pacemaker

The test comes as a response to several media reports about iPod interference with cardiac pacemakers. These claims were based only on a single incident where a person with a pacemaker experienced dizziness while using an iPod.

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