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Hi-Tech Body Implants and the Biohacker Movement (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Body modification has been growing in popularity. It's pretty common to see people with multiple piercings or stretched earlobes (called gauging). With this wider acceptance has risen a specific subset of Biohacking that seeks to add technology to your body through implants and other augmentation. The commonly available tech right now includes the addition of a magnet in your fingertip, or an RFID chip in your hand to unlock doors and start your car. Cameron Coward looked into this movement — called Grinding — to ask what it's like to live with tech implants, and where the future will take us.
Yawn. Bio-electrical implants have been stable for decades, and there's really been no improvement over a few analog filters and a jack that sticks out of your head to connect the electronics to htat was used in the earliest designs. The "digital" modern versions with the embedded transceivers have a fraction of the battery life, they mistake digitization for actual signal quality, they *wildly* undersample audio to transmit power levels instead of preserving the mixed frequency original signals with all those time critical zero crossings for "plosive" sounds, they cost ridiculously more, and they're far more vulnerable to failures that force re-implantation, usually in the other ear.
I have an artificial device implanted in my abdomen that performs the function of my failed kidneys. It's powered by my own metabolic processes and has the potential to work maintenance free for decades. It's also totally open source.