Just a quick follow-up to my post on RFID tagging [Danish]. The adhesive “tattoos” pictured above are a nice representation of what will eventually become mainstream in hospitals.

The tattoo is best placed where you can easily touch it with your phone, so I put it on the underside of my right wrist. (Being a lefty, I usually hold my phone in my left hand.) The idea is to tap the phone on the tattoo to unlock it instead of using a traditional pattern or PIN lock code. The Moto X sees the tattoo as if it were a Skip device, and once you’ve set up the lockscreen to unlock via NFC, the phone’s security screen can be bypassed with just a tap.

It’s a neat parlor trick and amusing to show off to others, but practical use is limited. The phone will only recognize the tattoo when the screen is on, so you either have to press the power button before tapping or rely on the Moto X’s motion sensing to wake the screen up when you pick up the phone. The whole process actually takes longer than just typing my PIN or drawing my swipe code. It also requires two limbs to accomplish, whereas the traditional methods can be easily done with one hand. That’s not to mention that you need to set the whole thing up again every time you replace the tattoo on your body. Unless I specifically thought about using the tattoo to unlock my phone, I quickly forgot about it and would use the other, more traditional methods most of the time. Old habits are hard to break, after all.

A plastic bracelet or ID-tag would probably work better than a sticker. One could of course go all in on becoming a psyborg but that requires diving into territory most people wouldn’t be comfortable with.