Implants turn humans into cyborgs
Implants turn humans into cyborgs
Radio frequency identification chips replace house key
Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, January 07, 2006
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Cyborgs have stepped out of science fiction and into real life with a small but growing group of tech aficionados who are getting tiny computer chips implanted into their bodies to do everything from opening doors to unlocking computer programs.
Amal Graafstra and his girlfriend Jennifer Tomblin never have to worry about forgetting the keys to her Vancouver home or locking themselves out of Graafstra’s Volkswagen GT.
They can simply walk up to the door and, with a wave of a hand, the lock will open. Ditto for the computer. No more struggling to remember complicated passwords and no more lost keys.
As Graafstra puts it, he could be buck naked and still be carrying the virtual keys to unlock his home.
"I did it for the very real function of replacing keys. It saves me having to walk around with a huge chain of keys in my pocket," said Graafstra, 29, who spends a lot of time in Vancouver, although he calls Bellingham, Wash. — where he operates several businesses — home.
It’s all thanks to tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) chips — costing about $2 each — that are already in fairly common use for applications from livestock identification to merchandise tracking.
Think of the tiny ampoule that your vet implants under the skin of your dog or cat for identification if the animal is lost. All it takes is a special reader flashed over the skin and Fido can be on his way home.
Graafstra did much the same, only the three-by-13 millimetre chip was put under the skin of his left hand by a surgeon. A second one, measuring two-by-12 millimetres, is in his right hand.
Using his computer skills, Graafstra was able to modify the locks on his car and his house so they would be activated by a built-in reader.
Graafstra, whose book RFID Toys is already listed on Amazon.com and due out in February, said he got the idea from pets’ tags.
"I’m a project, gadget-builder kind of guy and I saw cats and dogs getting these tags and I spent a few years thinking about the different ways they could be used," he said.
It was only when he came upon non-proprietary parts that he could hack up to use in his own applications that Graafstra asked a surgeon he knew to implant the tiny tag in his left hand. It was a five-minute operation with a scalpel and the tag sits under the skin in the webbing between his thumb and index finger. That was last March, but most recently Graafstra had the second chip implanted, this time with an injector needle by a family doctor.
"It wasn’t a big deal," he said. "I can’t even feel it unless I push on it with my finger."
The RFID reader for Graafstra’s chip is made by a University of Calgary spin-off, Phidgets Inc., which sells the reader for $65 Cdn. Graafstra found it through the company’s U.S. reseller Phidgets USA, which sells readers and tags.
The company’s technology is used in similar personalized identification applications, such as a U.S. university that issues tags to students that they slip in front of a reader to find information in their schedules. However, the students and most people who rely on the technology carry it around in cards in their wallets, not in their bodies.
