Ryan wrote: 1. Can you feel the chip inside your hand? 2. Is there a possibility of breaking the chip while it's in your hand? For example, when putting extreme pressure on a wrench or other tool? 3. Would this be difficult to extract, without leaving scars on my hand? I'm into this, but I also know damn well there will be something better available 10 years down the road and I'd like to upgrade without it being a big deal. I'd assume a surgeon could extract it right out the same hole location it went in with little difficulty? Has anyone asked their doctor this question? 4. Unrelated, but can someone tell me more about the HITAG 2048 S & it's features, and what you use it for. I am very, very interested in this.

Hi Ryan,

1) Only if I poke at it with my finger. Some people place their implants in areas where they come up against bone and/or tendons and I'm sure they feel their implants ever day, but because of the area in my hands I choose I forget they are even there until I go to use them.

2) Always test the tag you want to implant first. Most of the DIY implanting going on use EM4102 or HITAG tags, and these are not meant for implantation, so the quality of glass or epoxy fill might not be the same as tags meant for implantation into animals (FriendChip/AVID/etc.) or humans (VeriChip). I did some simple stress tests on the tags I was planning on using (bought extras for testing) and I was satisfied that if my hand ever received the amount of direct blunt force to the implant area of my hand required to break the tag, some broken glass in my hand would be the least of my worries. The fact is, it will always be possible to break these tags with a serious enough impact, but I highly doubt you will be able to stress the implant into breaking by turning a wrench or clenching your hands. If you placed the implant in the same area of your body that I did, your skin would probably rip before the glass broke.

3) This all depends on what type of tag you implant and where. If you implant a DIY style glass tag with no anti-migration coating, and you place it just under the dermis (skin) layer, then removal/replacement would be a snap, with minimal scarring. You'd probably have a very small (1mm to 2mm) scar from the scalpel incision needed to remove the implant.

If you implant an animal/human tag with an anti-migration coating, depending on the coating you could require a larger incision and more flesh cutting/tearing to get the implant out. An anti-migration coating is designed to "lock" the implant in place by allowing tissue to grow into it's porous surface, stopping the implant from moving around. This obviously makes it a little more difficult to remove, resulting in a larger skin scar and a little bit of internal tissue scarring.

If you get an FDA approved VeriChip implanted deep into your arm muscle, the implant is designed to be permanent (even states so in their product documentation). Removal of this type of tag is difficult because it too has an anti-migration coating, or in VeriChip's case a special "cup" the tag sits in. It's implant dept also makes removal difficult because you need a larger incision and a lot of pushing aside and/or cutting of tissue to get to the tag. Once located, the tag will have to be cut out, or removed from the anti-migration "cup" it sits in. If they remove the tag from the AM-cup, it's likely they would just leave the cup inside you, which I wouldn't be happy with... especially with concerns over the cancerous growths this coating/cup may cause.

4) The Philips HITAG 2048 S tag is typically a 134KHz passive tag with a 2048 bits separated into read/write memory blocks. It also has limited but functional 40 bit cryptosecurity features built in. You can program the tag to function in one of several "modes", giving the tag a lot of flexibility. I use this tag in my right hand for experimenting with mostly, but on occasion I use it as a more secure method of identifying myself in situations/projects where higher security levels are necessary.