Developers unveil electronic tattoos for payments and healthcare

Chaotic Moon Tech Tats
SKIN DEEP: Tech Tats could be used for monitoring health and making payments

Creative studio Chaotic Moon has demonstrated a concept it calls Tech Tats, tattoo-like formations of components and conductive paint that create an electronic circuit which adheres to the wearer’s skin. The temporary tattoos include a microprocessor and the company envisages them performing tasks such as health monitoring or making payments.

“This is really going beyond what the fitness tracker is and we’re right now looking into the medical field specifically, because there’s a lot of monitoring devices that take up a lot of room and space,” the company’s create technologist Eric Schneider explains.

“Rather than going to the doctor once a year to get your physical, this tattoo could be something that you just put on your body once a year and it monitors everything that they would do in the physical and sends that to your doctor and if there’s an issue, they could call you. The tech tattoos can really tie in everything into one package.

“They can look at early signs of fever, your vital signs, heart rate — everything that it needs to look at to notify you that you’re getting sick or that your child’s getting sick.”

“We carry wallets around and they’re so vulnerable,” Schneider adds. “With a tech tattoo, you could carry all your information on your skin and when you want your credit card information or your ID, you can pull that up automatically through the system.”

“This would be implemented by securely storing data on a skin mounted microcontroller and transferring the data when the user specifies based on a gesture or fingerprint on a tap to pay style device,” Ben Lamm, CEO of Chaotic Moon, explained to Vice. “Think of it as bio-NFC — instead of tapping your phone on a pay terminal, you’d gesture and payment info would be handed off to the terminal from the controller.”

A video gives an overview of the Tech Tats concept:

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