So Capt. Jean-Luc Picard says, “Steady number one,” (have you noticed there is no number two) “the Borg are upon us.” Well, he’s right. The Borg are upon us. Maha Russhie has a cochlear implant and can hear only because he has a circuit board connected to his nervous system. The eye doctors are fooling around with an implant for the eyes of blind people, and lenses for those who have had cataract surgery that focus like the real thing. And the Japanese, among others, are building and trying out artificial limbs which are essentially articulated robots connected to the patient’s nervous system or muscles. We are so used to pacemakers that we no longer are even impressed that “sillycan diodes” like the ones in War Games are running some people’s hearts.

There are hearing aids galore. And they are interference-prone. Then there are the passive machine parts: glasses and false teeth not to mention the ever-popular wooden leg. People are and, in fact, have been for centuries slowly at first but now gaining breakneck speed turning themselves into cyborgs with artificial hearts. The half human half machine horrors of the 1930s sci-fi pulp magazines are here. “It’s the Borg, Mr. Data, the Borg.”

So first we had RFI, then EMI, HERO and a TEMPEST in our tea pots tied together with HEMP rope. Now we have or will have Borg Electronic Anatomical Noise Syndrome or BEANS. Once we convert about a quarter of us to part machine we are going to find out that the world is full of BEANS. First, the electronic circuitry in the implants and artificial moving parts, hearts, legs, arms and so on will be susceptible to high-power electric fields. We already have problems with folks who have pacemakers when they must be near powerful radio transmitters or even microwave ovens..

But this is just the tip of the iceberg compared with the coming titanic problems. This generation of moving mechanical legs, arms and hearts have susceptibility problems to some extent. But when in a few years they are controlled by the patient’s voluntary or involuntary nervous system directly, Katy-bar-the-door. Nerve impulses, skin moisture, small muscle twitches and the like will need to be sensed and amplified then fed to motors, electro-strictive materials and so on. The signals to be sensed are by and large small. Or are they just all small or just not large? We will need to measure currents in nanoamperes and voltages in microvolts on the surface of or within the flesh of human-BEANS.

Now you may know that you can enhance the ability of a transistor radio to pick up distant weak stations by putting your hand on the antenna. I assume there still is such a thing as a transistor radio and a weak station. The reason is that the body is conductive and makes a dandy antenna system. We can therefore suppose that since equipment which records brain waves and is extremely susceptible to the electromagnetic enticement must be in a shielded room, a fellow with a mechanical leg would have to spend his life in a shielded enclosure or suffer from computer terminal St. Vitus dance.

If you work in or run an EMC laboratory take heart, lungs, kidneys, the lot because every device that comes in contact with people is going to have to meet the BEANS immunity specifications. It’s going to make the rush to measure every white box from Seoul and record and rerecord its IEC-61000-4-2 response look like slack time. Oh yes, people will still walk across carpets in Minneapolis in February, but when they touch the light switch they will have a heart attack. And there will be unfortunate gay blades doing the Charleston and the Blackbottom on the sidewalks of New York as they pass the WABC antenna perched high atop the Empire State Building.

The accountants in the labs will be busy counting all the BEANS and are going to be ecstatic or is that ex-static. Buck up, all you old BEANS – the best of EMC is yet to come.