How trustworthy are medical device softwares?

Even though I am mostly a Machine Learning/Computer Vision/Artificial Intelligence person, I do enjoy talks in other areas of computer science or mathematics. I think it is important to have breadth in ones field, which is somewhat contradictory to the dogma of being a PhD student -- obtaining ultimate depth of knowledge and expertise in a small portion of your field of interest. Nevertheless, I pretty much go to all the "Distinguished Lecture Series" talks with a quest for understanding the cutting edge work that is going on outside my area of "expertise" (and of course, the free cookies and coffee are a good motivation as well).

Enough rambling. I got to attend a great talk by Kevin Fu on the security and privacy of medical devices (such as pacemakers) and RFID based embedded devices. He raised some very interesting points about the current state of the art in the security and privacy of such pervasive computing devices, and possible research directions to address these points. His approach appears to be based on thinking of new ways of designing the software and protocols that are effective and energy efficient. Kevin is also noted in TR 35.