A Swedish man can make payments by simply waving his hand. Patric Lanhed, a software developer at DigitasLBi, made this futuristic payment possible by implanting a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip in his hand. This week he successfully transferred money into his Bitcoin wallet by holding his hand up to a sensor, which read the RFID chip under his skin. Juan José Tara Ortiz, an embedded system engineer at Arduino, developed the Near Field Communication (NFC) hardware for recording, writing, and reading the chip.
Their first demonstration was with Bitcoin, but Lanhed says this new way of structuring data will enable the chip to store multiple records at once, so the chip could replace his entire wallet. In a post on the blog-publishing platform Medium, Lanhed wrote, “One major part of this project has been to specify how to store different data on the chip. The aim is to have this accepted as a standard so we’ll be releasing this as open source.”
The chip could be used for storing: medical records, personal identification such as a passport or license, travel documents, and data authentication. In the future, Lanhed and anyone else who implants a chip could unlock their computers, cars, and homes with a little hand tap.
