Before silicon gets under your skin, get it etched on top with a Tech Tat

By Chloe Olewitz Published November 25, 2015

If you haven’t heard already, the future of wearables is going to get under your skin – literally. Implantable technology trackers may still be a distant future, but Chaotic Moon is presenting an interim option in the form of Tech Tats. These removable biosensor wearables put complicated circuitry into the form of a temporary tattoo. Before you know it, you could be wearing a Tech Tat to get diagnostics when you’re feeling ill, to monitor your fitness during a workout, or even to check in for an annual physical from the comfort of your home.

The Tech Tat circuitry is extremely thin, but it is basically laying a circuit board full of chips and sensors on your skin. Still, Tech Tats stick out less than a lot of popular wearable gadgets and fitness trackers. And since the temporary adhesive affixes to the skin, it could easily be placed under clothing or at least away from the wrist for the sake of discretion.

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Tech Tats feature an ATiny85 microcontroller that serves as the brains connecting any sensors implanted in the tattoo’s circuitry. Current prototypes already include temperature sensors and ambient light sensors. In the future, Tech Tats could add on more biosensors to record vital signs like heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure. Electroconductive paint transmits information to the microcontroller, which stores the resulting data.

In the world of health and medicine, a Tech Tat could transmit data to an app on your mobile device over a Bluetooth Low Energy connection. Professional settings like hospitals and doctors’ offices could use Tech Tats to triage patients and get faster diagnostics. Chaotic Moon is even suggesting the Tech Tat as a possibility in the world of finance, where mobile payment solutions are creeping towards more wearable options.

Chaotic Moon is presenting society with an interim step from wearable trackers to implantable ones, but for these proposed applications, Tech Tats are a solution in themselves. The studio hasn’t announced when you can actually get a Tech Tat, but its focus on individual applications and inexpensive microcontroller suggests that Tech Tats will fall within a reasonable price range. Some day you might even buy them in bulk packages, like that box of Band-Aids that has been in your medicine cabinet for years.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Chloe is a writer from New York with a passion for technology, travel, and playing devil's advocate. You can find out more…

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