Companies are allowed to market computer ID chips which can be embedded under a person's skin in the US, after the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the technology its qualified approval.
The FDA said yesterday it would not block use of such devices as long as they contain no medical data - paving the way for the sale of devices such as the VeriChip, from Applied Digital Solutions.
VeriChip, an implantable, radio frequency identification biochip slightly larger than the size of a grain of rice, can be scanned (using equipment expected to cost between $1,000 and $3,000) to give a unique ID number. Its use is touted for security and emergency, as well as for medical applications. In South America, the chip has been bundled with a GPS-unit and sold to potential kidnap victims, Wired reports.
ADS intends to sell the chip for about $200, with an annual service charge of $40 for maintaining a user database.
In medicine (the main market), the idea is that if a patient is unconscious or otherwise unable to tell doctors about medical conditions then doctors can still find out this information from the ID contained on the VeriChip. This number is cross-referenced with hospital databases to give a patient's medical records.
News source: The Register
