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http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/peaceful-coexistence-on-the-radio-spectrum
Peaceful Coexistence on the Radio Spectrum The trials of a small team of engineers who set out to reanimate paralyzed limbs demonstrate the virtues
of dynamic spectrum sharing By Ariel Bleicher / April 2013
One day in 2003, Joseph Schulman faced a half-dozen or so military officers in a cheerless high-rise office outside the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C. He was 68 then, with piercing blue eyes and a full head of hair dyed chestnut. People
who knew him called him a “visionary” and a “mad, brilliant scientist.” For nearly 20 years, he had been president of the
Alfred Mann Foundation, a medical research center in Santa Clarita, Calif., known for developing cutting-edge electronic aids, including pacemakers and cochlear implants. Normally a self-assured guy, Schulman suddenly felt, he
says, “a little frightened.” He had come to what was then the Defense Spectrum Office to present his case for allowing a new medical technology to use some of the radio frequencies assigned to the U.S. military. He began by pulling from his pocket several small ceramic cylinders, which
he passed around. Those fuse-like tubes, Schulman explained, were intended to restore function to muscles whose nerves had been damaged. “Microstimulators,” he called them. A surgeon could implant
one in the body simply by using probing tools and a syringe. Inside the microstimulator were a battery and electronics, which controlled a pair of electrodes that could send pulses of current into a paralyzed limb. The electrodes could also pick up signals
from healthy nerves, such as in the stump of an amputated arm, where the devices could be used to guide a prosthetic hand. To perform these tasks, the microstimulators would need to be controlled by a pocketable radio. It was important that this be done wirelessly. Placing wires inside the body would take time, raising the risk of surgical complications and providing conduits
for bacterial infections. The trouble was that operating a wireless network of tiny implants in the body’s wet, salty interior required a special portion of radio spectrum. And Schulman knew the military owned the rights to it. But he believed that if he just asked nicely, he could
persuade the uniformed men across the table to share a slim slice of their electromagnetic pie with this potentially revolutionary invention, seeing as it might one day help wounded soldiers. “I was naive,” Schulman says. In fact, the spectrum campaign he began in 2003 lasted eight years and cost the foundation more than US $3 million in travel expenses, legal fees, and independent testing. But the quest proved more than a simple fight for frequencies.
In their drive to get microstimulators on the market, Schulman and his colleagues would find themselves swept up in a monumental restructuring of the divisions that make radio spectrum artificially scarce. Continues at
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