TechTat: The wearable credit card

Bio-wearables are a new form of technology that isn’t a part of the user — or an accessory that they can choose to wear — but a part of the person. It’s literally allowing someone to become one with the bio-wearable. TechTat is a form of bio-wearable that you can stick on your arm and wear for almost a full year that can monitor your vital signs and transfer financial information.

Chaotic Moon, a creative technology company from Austin, Texas, has come up with the TechTat. It is a tattoo that is embedded onto a person’s arm, and allows their financial and medical information to be tracked. The tattoo can send data from a micro-controller to an app on your phone using Bluetooth low energy. It monitors everything that a doctor would and can send them a notification if there is an issue with the wearer. It diminishes the need to have to constantly go for check-ups and doctors’ visits.

“This would be implemented by securely storing data on a skin mounted micro controller and transferring the data when the user specifies based on a gesture or fingerprint on a tap to pay style device,” CEO Ben Lamm said to Vice News. These tattoos would be on your skin, rather than under them as, “…people tend to get appropriately creeped out by implantable devices.”

The tattoos will last up to one year on your body and are made up of ATiny85 microcontroller, a single chip micro-controller developed by Atmel since the year 1996 with on-chip memory that receives data from temperature sensors using electro-conductive paint. The TechTat also includes LED lights that can illuminate the tattoo in the dark. It will securely store data on your skin, and transfer the data when the user performs a specific gesture. Rather than using a phone, the user would simply have to move their hand, and the TechTat would do the action for them. It would eliminate the need to carry around a wallet and credit cards.

This innovation could also be used in the military to check if a soldier is safe and make sure wounded soldiers get immediate assistance. The versatile tattoo can be used to check vital signs or find children in a crowd.

The TechTat’s possibilities are endless. Although the tattoo is still a prototype, Chaotic Moon plans to release it soon and make it easy for people to have access to them, even suggesting that they could be sold in bulk similar to Band-Aids.