Biowearables: Chaotic Moon Creates Tech Tats That Stick To Your Skin And Track Your Health
Right now, one in five Americans owns a fitness tracker. The wearable devices can tell you all types of information, from your steps taken in a day to the amount of calories you burn. But what if it could do far more than keep track of your fitness? With its Tech Tats, Austin, Texas-based developer Chaotic Moon hopes to do just that.
“This is really going beyond what the fitness tracker is,” Eric Schneider, creative technologist at Chaotic Moon, says in the video above. “Rather than going to the doctor once a year for your physical, this tattoo can be something that you put on your body once a year and it monitors everything that they would do in a physical and sends that to your doctor.”
The tattoos themselves are applied like the temporary tattoos you see kids wearing. To make the tattoos more like fitness trackers, however, the developers at Chaotic Moon use sensors and conductive paint. The sensors track for “early signs of fever, your vital signs, heart rate, everything it needs to look at to know that you’re getting sick,” Schneider said. The conductive paint, meanwhile, acts as a battery to powers the sensors.
Another thing Chaotic Moon hopes to achieve with its Tech Tats is to completely change the way we handle money. “We carry wallets around and they’re so vulnerable.” Schneider said. “With the Tech Tat, you can carry all your information on your skin and when you want your credit card information or your ID, you can pull that up automatically through the system.”
There is no timetable for the general release of Tech Tattoos, but the idea of having a wearable fitness tracker/wallet attached directly to your skin is an exciting prospect for those interested in wearables, from consumers to manufacturers.