Biohacking, where usually small devices are implanted under the skin to give us more technological abilities, are starting to gain a following. But, no doubt like a lot of people, I’m not sure that I would care to go under the knife to implant a chip just to make it convenient to pay for a cup of coffee. But with Tech Tats you may be able to have the capability of a biohack without resorting to permanent body modifications.
Just like temporary tattoos give the look of its permanent counterpart, Tech Tats place the biohacking on top of the skin for a more or less temporary mod. The tattoos feature a small chip (usually an ATiny85 micro controller ) that stores data from other body sensors, all connected by conductive paint that makes up the rest of the temporary tattoo. Low power Bluetooth communications allow the Tech Tats to communicate with mobile devices, allowing the collected data to be used in a wide number of applications.
Currently the focus is in health and fitness, which makes perfect sense given the capability of near-constant data collection from the user. Of course, mobile payments may be in the near future, and soon keys and passwords may be a thing of the past. Maybe such tattoos could even turn your body into a controller or an arm into a keyboard. Either way it goes, future technology like Tech Tats may be a great way to have the advantages of Biohacking without the need for actual body modifications.
