Would be nice…
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Perhaps an M1 design with two camcorder batteries and two coil outlets.
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Batteries are highly variable chemical reactors, and the quality varies from batch-to-batch and brand-to-brand. I can not control which substitute battery everyone uses, so I can not make a battery level detector that will work accurately for everyone under every condition with every possible kind of battery, so I do not waste time on this unnecessary feature.
The best thing to do, for maximum performance, is to change batteries often, replacing them with freshly charged batteries.
The fact is, everyone needs to get up and move frequently, very frequently. It only takes a few seconds to swap batteries, and you should develop the habit of changing them every 2-3 hours. The batteries can last longer than this based on pulse frequency, intensity, age and quality of the battery, temperature, and other factors. But to get the best performance, develop the habit of frequent battery changes.
At night, consider plugging in to eliminate the need for battery changes:
A9 - 9v adapter
M1 - USB to Mini B from a USB charger port
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the charger that came with my M1 stopped charging after 5 months. The led doesn’t turn red with discharged battery inserted .
So I just purchased this kit which is a significant upgrade at 1400 mah vs 1200 mah .
Similarly, the charger that came with my M1 just stopped working last week. The led doesn’t turn red when the discharged battery is inserted. I bought a replacement charger as well, but this was disappointing.
Battery quality does vary. That is an unpleasant fact of life. Unfortunately I cannot control that. But I did my best to make sure you can get (usually) a pair of good quality batteries and a charger for about $15. About 50% of the design effort for the model M1 went into battery selection and very thorough testing. By the time I was done, I had to take two full truck loads of batteries that were rejected in the design and testing process to the recycling center. I had so many reject batteries left over, it was actually an explosion hazard. I am not exaggerating: I used to be a fire chief, and there are limits for concentrations of hazardous materials beyond which a site must be reclassified as occupationally hazardous. If you ever spend time designing products, one of the first things you will learn is that batteries are a huge problem, always. There is never a perfect solution, and even if you find a good one, manufacturers change their battery specs all the time. You might recall only about two years ago when a major smart phone manufacturer was almost brought down over a battery explosion problem, which was not caused by them, it was caused by their battery manufacturer.
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Hi @Bob, have you seen issues with the charger? In my case, the 6 batteries I have charged just fine with the replacement charger (same make/model). The replacement charger cost is low, so not a problem. Thanks for your design decisions to allow easily replacement of batteries/chargers.
Yes, I have. When I evaluated the batteries/chargers for the M1 design in 2016~2017, the overall quality was good. I think that the quality of the batteries and the chargers being built has gone down somewhat since then, and now we hear from customers from time to time that chargers have failed. They are still pretty good, but some lower quality chargers seem to have entered the market. It might be best to steer clear of the absolute cheapest ones you can find when ordering them.
Haha maybe someone should make a smartphone app as an interface to the device. Is this idea too farfetched @Bob?
We get this suggestion every few days. I’d like to say it has been suggested a thousand times, but really, the number is probably somewhere in the range of 300-400. Maybe 500.
This is a perfectly reasonable request, and it makes sense on first pass to consider combining a smart phone and wireless technology with ICES-PEMF. We have considered wireless interfaces as a possibility for almost as long as smart phones have existed (iPhone ~ 2007), since before even bringing ICES-PEMF technology to market.
But think about it though: you set the PEMF device once, then it runs… and runs… and runs. Most people (>90%) just use the same program all the time, so they never change it. Please don’t respond “But I …”, you would be the exception. We have studied this in detail, and the vast majority of people just try a few different settings for a week or two, find one they like, and then stick with it essentially forever.
Sometimes you do not need to interface with the device for a month or more, so having a wireless interface would be a waste of many things: time, complexity (greater risk of device malfunction), increased energy (shorter battery life), larger size circuit board (bulkier device), increased cost (we would need one full-time engineer just to keep up with OS updates to maintain device compatibility, that by itself would add 25% to the list price)… but none of this actually makes the device function better at what it is supposed to do. It would be like making a wireless toaster. The very rare individual might like to spend time interacting with their toaster, but for most of us that would be a frivolous waste.
Things that you interface with all the rime, well, maybe a wireless interface makes sense. Such as a phone. But for a device like a PEMF system, especially where ultra-portability is the primary feature of value (after the fact that it actually works), wireless interfaces make much less sense at every level: technical, human factors, economic, manufacturing, …
The only reason PEMF companies slap on a wireless interface is because it is a sales angle, trying to make it shiny to get people to buy it. But it adds absolutely no functional value.
None whatsoever.
But it is technically possible, and when we think the core technology is doing what it really needs to do and a wireless interface would add real value, and it would be worth the extra cost (there are good engineering reasons for doing this, but no one has suggested them yet, most people just assume wireless is an improvement for everything) then we will engineer a new product, that will likely have a significant price increase, but the value will be commensurate with the improvement in overall functionality.
I understand and it totally makes sense.
Maybe if it’s on a mobile device it will have the computational power to do the math and estimate that threshold exposure value that someone will start getting results? (Assuming you’re reasonably confident of your estimation algorithms) If it’s the exact same thing controlled through an app interface, it might look shinier but not necessarily add any value. But if the app allows you to harness some of the computational power and improved UI, there might be some value there. People would be willing to pay more for improved effectiveness, or a less convoluted path to effectiveness. Many people take mobile apps for granted because they often appear to be free, but in fact most of them cost a lot to make.
I watched Shark Tank a little while ago and this episode they made a drone frame for a phone - just putting a phone in there with the helicoptor wings and fly it. They said most of the expensive parts of a drone (camera, GPS, accelerator, etc) are present in any modern smartphones already. This reduces the end-user expense for owning a drone (on top of a phone) from the thousands to $99. The analogy here is if there is anything that already exist in a phone that you can use to somehow improve the device.
For ICES-PEMF technology, the key parameters are calculated and hard-wired into the device. They are not adjustable, so they do not require further calculation. They stay the same all the time to assure biological effectiveness. The only parameters that are adjustable are the “secondary parameters”, the ones that are pretty much a matter of personal preference.
You can’t really calculate that kind of thing. People respond differently and the science is too unknown to calculate what an individual might need. I have determined experimentally the range that has a biological effect, and the settings on the devices reflect this range, which varies widely based on individual (and species, for pets) variability. There are no estimation algorithms.
It is also not a precise thing: you only need to be in a very broad range to make it work. PEMF charlatans try to sell the Idea that they have a “secret precise frequency”. This is just fraud: there is no such thing.
Computational power is not really useful here, because there is nothing further that can be computed, and nothing that needs to be computed. It would be like having a super-computer try to estimate your mood (or something?) to try to set the perfect water temperature for a bath… there is really no such thing.
Here is the key: I see no way that improved computational power at the point of the user will improve the effectiveness of PEMF as the science currently stands. That may change in the future, but right now, that feature would be just a gimmick. Some PEMF manufacturers have tried this, but it is a marketing strategy to sell PEMF to the tech-savvy demographic, it has no basis in real science, and it does not make PEMF more effective in any way. But it looks cool on a web page.
The computational power necessary to achieve effective PEMF is already available in an embedded microcontroller chip that costs only about $4.99. The rest of the cost is in the high power, ultra-efficient, tuned pulsing hardware and coils, none of which have any similarity to anything on any smart phone. In fact, smart phones are specifically designed to not work in the voltage, power, frequency-response range that is required for effective PEMF.
This is why DIY smart-phone-based PEMF simply does not work. You have to build the tuned output stage from separate hardware, and then the computational aspect of the PEMF becomes utterly trivial and the phone itself is unnecessary.
Smart phones are great, and they work well for a certain range of things. But they are terrible at doing many other tasks.
on a practical level, network access to these devices make sense only when scaling to over 20 devices that are built into hospital/care beds or chairs and you want to control or set/see status for a group of beds, locations etc…
but i agree on an individual level this may be too much tech for a one off.
maybe one day when pemf is a part of mainstream healthcare and built-in to therapy beds at institutions, then it would be more useful in that way. 
Bob,
Are there powerbanks available that will run 2 M1s at the same time? If so, do you have the links to any?
Hi Russ,
Power banks are a tricky issue: the manufacturers change the specs all the time without notice, so that a specific power bank that might work well one day, if you order it two weeks later, does not quite work the same way.
The problem is this: they are constantly “improving” power banks to make them appear to hold more power or last longer, so they adjust the cut-off current that tries to sense when an attached device/battery is fully charged, so that the powerbank shuts off to prevent further current drain. It does this by sensing the current load on the power bank.
The problem is that this is not standardized: some powerbanks shut off when the power drain falls below 50 mA, some shut off at 70 mA, some at 100 mA, some more, some less, and they always seem to change.
This works for simple loads such as a battery that needs to be recharged, but a complex load such as one of our products, which draws very low electrical current because it is so efficient, also looks like a “charged battery”. And some power banks will shut off, while others keep charging. But unfortunately this changes all of the time, and I spent months trying to develop a table of power banks that work, and ones that do not. But by the time I would make a table, they mostly would have changed and none of the information that I collected was accurate anymore.
So, as a rule of thumb, it is hit-or-miss which power banks will work. I am not sure how to connect multiple M1’s from a single channel of a power bank, but one M1 could be connected to each channel if more than one output channel is available.
The only reliable solution I have found, that always works, is to add a 100 Ohm resistor to the output load (the USB cable) from the power bank. This, plus the very small current draw to the M1/C5, will cause the power bank to think the load is always sufficient to keep it ON.
This requires some technical skill, but it is fairly easy to do, and it works all of the time. I am thinking about changing the basic design of the M1 and C5 to include this adaptation to non-standardized power ports, but that would essentially make the devices much less power efficient overall.
It is a tough design decision with no easy or satisfactory answers.
And if you want to use a power bank for the M1 or C5, if you can not add a resistive load, you unfortunately will have to try power banks by trial and error, since they change all the time and some of them work while others do not.
WOW! That was a great answer. However, I still don’t know if I can buy just one powerbank that enables me to connect to two mini usb cables that connect to two different M1s. I understand the shutdown action of some powerbanks when sensing to little draw. I don’t want you to feel responsible for that problem. I just want to know if I can buy one that enables powering two M1s. I could not determine that from the descriptions on Amazon. I will assume the shutoff problem. Thanks Bob. I really appreciate you.
Some power banks have two USB outlets. That would allow you to easily power/recharge two different devices. In most cases, if they shut down for low loads they will shut down independently.
If you are good with electronics and soldering, then you could put two mini-USB connectors on one cable that would plug into a single USB port on the power bank. This would work only for charging (this case), but not for data transfer functions (the usual case for USB, not relevant if you only connect the power wires and are only charging)
So, the options you have available depend upon your level of electronics skill, unless you go with the simpler “two charger port outputs = two M1s” option.
Thanks for the clear response. I am using both M1s 12-18 hours per day. I am still trying to decide if I need to buy a higher gauss pemf to use on my bad kidneys. Pawluk has said it takes 1850(?) gauss to penetrate the 9 inches through my kidneys. I read on this forum about the guy that used ICES for his kidneys but his results sounded “maybe but inconclusive”.
Well, there is a lot of bad scientific data out there, and sometimes it leaks into clinical practice. The need for high Gauss levels is a misinterpretation and misunderstanding of basic science. It is not about “Gauss”, and has never been about Gauss. It is about the differential equations related to the change of magnetic field (Gauss) per unit time. The result: manufacturers who make crude and inefficient PEMF have no other option but to resort to high Gauss levels which eventually drive the system into a biologically effective range. But the excess energy and inefficiency can easily be 98% or higher by this crude method.
Also, PEMF, properly applied, has regional effects and does not require a specific “Gauss” at a specific point.
But they keep droning on about the need for “Gauss”, thinking that repetition forces something that is false to eventually become true. But it does not.
The real, short-term effect though is that if they can just get people to drink the cool-aide, they can charge a lot of money for crude, inefficient PEMF systems. That much is real, and it is true.
My opinion: use an efficient PEMF system, apply the coils properly (probably stacked, NOT 2x2 arrays), and do this at higher levels of power on a setting such as Omni8 or Alpha Wave for as many hours as you can during the day. Simple dosage guidelines are not really relevant with PEMF: long duration/low intensity seems to have much better long term effects than short duration/high intensity. Crucially, get real lab testing done to make sure you see an effect.
A much larger, less efficient, but vastly more costly PEMF system may also work, or it may not. Individual responses to PEMF vary (as they do for everything else)
and just for the record… the “maybe but inconclusive” post on this forum says a lot about the honesty here. Other “user testimonials” are generally always positive and typically solicited or even posted by a group of paid sock-puppets.
For example, one competing PEMF system (a low-quality copy of our systems) has a stable of Chinese workers posing as “verified customers” who will tell you anything you need to hear to get you to make a purchase. But on this forum, you usually get the ugly truth: the effects are often very impressive, but sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.