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.

Comments

Not so high tech

[ColdWetDog]

TFA goes on about putting magnets and RFID tags inside people as the state of the art. I'm sorry, something we do to our pets doesn't really get a 'hacking' imprimatur, much less 'high tech'.

Wake me up when somebody open sources the way to access human memory with a digital chip ('Microsofts in William Gibson's parlance'). Or making some drug or device that actually enhances the human condition. And no, splitting a tongue in half so you can move both muscles at the same time is not an 'enhancement'.

Re:Not so high tech

[ShanghaiBill]

Or making some drug or device that actually enhances the human condition.

My father-in-law has an implant that improves his hearing. My wife has a eye lens enhancer that greatly improves her vision. I also had a vision enhancement device, but then I had LASIK, so I no longer need it.

Re:Not so high tech

[PopeRatzo]

And no, splitting a tongue in half so you can move both muscles at the same time is not an 'enhancement'.

My wife disagrees.

Ask any deaf person with a cochlear implant

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:rhetorical 'why':

[willworkforbeer]

They think they're on the cutting edge of becoming Johnny Mnemonic... but really more likely to just get an infection and become Johnny Mneumonia.

Re:This is how the Borg get their start

[PopeRatzo]

How much longer before you get your iPhone embedded in your head?

Funny that you mention that. Last night at the theater, there was a guy who kept getting texts on his iPhone during the movie. I was thinking of how much longer before I embedded his iPhone in his head. His girlfriend finally took his phone away and turned it off. I thanked her on the way out.