13 April, 2005
category: RFID
“The San Antonio security consultant is one of a small but growing number of people who have wireless chips implantedm to make personal information available to authorised parties with a radio frequency identification (RFID) scanner. In Krull’s case, the chip was implanted two months ago so hospital staff could access his medical information quickly in emergency situations. Applied Digital and its subsidiary VeriChip got authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last October to sell the chips for human implantation, and has put in about 1,000 chips so far.
Most of the publicised cases have the whiff of “publicity stunt” about them. This chipping technology is well proven on dogs, so it’s no great technical breakthrough to use it on humans. It’s tempting to speculate that this whole thing is a bid by the RFID industry to take attention from Criticisms of Wal-Mart’s over-ambitions scheme, and the nascent state of management schemes to build RFID scanners into real IT systems.”