At least two companies - one in the United States and the other in Sweden - have begun to provide their employees with a microchip implantation service. In theory, such devices will help workers open doors, pay for lunch, and so on with the touch of a hand.
In the United States, 41 employees of a small technology company volunteered to wear a microchip under their skin. And employees of firms located in the new Stockholm innovation cluster Epicenter were also offered to voluntarily, as an experiment, implant a microchip under the skin of their hands, with which they can open electronic door locks, use copy machines and other office tools.
NFC chips are implanted into the soft tissue between the index and thumb using a syringe and are triggered when they are in the range of a reader - a printer or other corporate instrument. The authors of the idea believe that the more employees use microchips, the better the corporate access control system is protected: unlike passes and other identifiers, the chip cannot be lost and practically cannot be forged.
The implantation operation has not yet passed medical examination and certification, but, according to Martin Tondel, chief physician of the Occupational Medicine and Occupational Safety Center at the Academic Hospital in Uppsala, the risk of implantation of the chip cannot be high, since it does not have radiation. The physician also does not think that microchips can begin to wander through the human body and cause, for example, a blockage of blood vessels.
Today, more than 150 of Epicenter's 700 employees have implanted microchips. Wisconsin-based vending machine vendor Three Square Market (32M) is also introducing staff to digital authentication: more than 60% of employees have implanted a chip in their company. And if you believe the media, these people are happy with the "upgrade".
In Russia, an obstetrician-gynecologist Alexander Volchek, who works in one of the maternity hospitals in Novosibirsk, has already implanted six chips under his skin. Some of them are used to open doors and pass through the turnstile at work, others operate at a different frequency and are capable of storing from 800 bytes to 1 kilobyte of information. One of them contains a business card, while others allow you to unlock your computer, store passwords, and so on.
The doctor noted that the pinnacle of technology will be the medical application of such chips and a victory, for example, can be considered the creation of an implantable glucometer for measuring blood sugar, especially since the necessary technical basis for this already exists.
Volchek said that the standard chip size is 2x12 mm, and the minimum size is 1.5x8 mm. The design, containing a wound ferrite core and a very small chip, is “packaged” in a small biologically inert glass tube. They are injected under the skin with a large syringe with a thick needle (injector). They can be easily removed if desired.
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