Invisible Ink Embeds Immunization Records Into a Child’s Skin, “The Team Eventually Wants to Inject Sensors”
December 22nd, 2019Via: Scientific American:
Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record directly into the skin.
Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin. The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish.
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The work was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
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The researchers hope to add more detailed information to the dots, such as the date of vaccination. Along with them, the team eventually wants to inject sensors that could also potentially be used to track aspects of health such as insulin levels in diabetics, Jaklenec says.
Invisible ink tattoos. Didn’t see that one coming. That could catch on, e.g. black light ink, etc. Step by step we descend into the abyss.