Body mods are nothing new, and facial and head implants that give you ridges, horns and bumps have been a staple for fans for decades. But with the increasing miniaturization of electronic gadgets, more and more implants are also augmenting the wearers digital and electronic life.
Scott Baker who has multiple implants under his scalp including horn humps was one of the first to have a bluetooth headset implanted under his scalp in 2010. That has since been upgraded to a phone the size of a quarter that is mostly a battery. the phone senses hand gestures and voice commands, otherwise there is no physical interface to touch.
Scott demonstrated some hand gestures and explained that there are tiny RFD chips embedded in his hands and the phone uses those to sense hand movements.
Ben Largo looks like an average businessman at work and doesn't want any implant that looks like a body mod, but as a practical matter he needed to keep his mobile phone handy, so he had a phone implanted in his hand. "I was always losing or forgetting my phone and this way I will never again misplace it. Now if I could only find the charger."
Unfortunately after Largo talked to this reporter he was in a serious car accident and he lost the arm with the implant. Emergency responders were able to retrieve the arm and recover the implant for later reuse in his remaining hand.
For all the hoopla, implantable tech certainly has its critics: Parents have come under fire for having tracking devices implanted in their kids, and the ACLU is protesting a move by the department of Justice to implant tracking devices in sex offenders.
Pursuing the cutting edge in implantable tech, engineering teams at MIT are in a fierce competition to miniaturize 3D printing technology so it can be implanted up the butt. Meanwhile, Team Apple is busy miniaturizing an implantable screen for the cornea to make the world's first Eye-Phone .
