I remember an informal experiment we conducted with cell phones in operating rooms when they first became widely used. Of course, they were initially banned because of possible interference with the numerous electronic medical devices used in OR’s. Also of course, everyone ignored the ban.
We anesthesiologists teamed up with the hospital’s medical equipment maintenance team (this was before invention of IT departments) to perform some informal testing. At the time - 1993 - I had an NEC ‘brick’ style cell phone - the latest & greatest of the moment. As I recall it transmitted with a whopping 3 watts of power. We turned on all the equipment in the room and went to each piece of equipment touching the phone antenna (it had a stiff wire type retractable antenna) to each piece of equipment while transmitting. We were unable to observe any effect on anything. The result was that we felt less guilty about ignoring the ban. The convenience and improved speed of communication among clinicians made their routine use simply irresistible.