Microchip implant (human)

Microchip implant (human)

A human Microchip Implant is an integrated circuit device or RFID tag encased in silicate glass and implanted into a human's body. Such implants can be used for information storage, including personal identification, medical history, medications, allergies, and contact information.

Initial Trials

The first reported experiment with an RFID implant was carried out in 1998 by the British scientist Kevin Warwick [1]. As a test his implant was used to open doors, switch on lights and cause verbal output within a building. The implant has since been held in the Science Museum (London).

Current uses

In 2004, the VeriChip Corporation received preliminary approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market its device in the U.S. within specific guidelines.[2] Since its approval, about 80 hospitals and 232 doctors have elected to use the system.[3]
By implanting such a chip with a patient's medical record, hospitals and emergency workers can immediately gain access to an ill or injured person's medical history regardless of location. Implanted chips are impossible to lose, which could reduce the chances of information theft. Homes and automobiles could be equipped with scanners for microchips, making house and car keys obsolete (although an RFID lock requires a working power source to function). Locks and ignition switches would only work for persons with an appropriately programmed chip.

Possible problems

If the microchips are completely unencrypted, they would be extremely vulnerable to hacker attacks and interception by third-party scanners. By scanning secretly, someone could steal all of the information on a chip and could clone the signal, possibly leading to criminal misuse of medical files and insurance information. For example, a patient's list of known allergies could be altered maliciously, causing injury or death, or his/her insurance could be copied for another unrelated person to use.[3]

According to the FDA, implantation of the chip itself poses some health concerns. A patient could react adversely to the chip itself by infection or allergy, or it could be implanted improperly. It could dislodge itself and move to a different part of the body than where it was first implanted. The implant could also fail on its own at any time, and the information contained in it could be lost.

More serious trauma could occur if the chip reacts to outside source, such as a strong electrical field or a magnetic resonance imager (MRI) machine. The strong magnets used in an MRI scanner could destroy the implant and cause serious burns, internally and externally.[4]
Veterinary and toxicology studies carried out from 1996 to 2006 found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous sarcomas. Data suggests that up to 10% of the implanted lab animals developed malignant cancers originating in the tissue surrounding the microchips. Dr. Cheryl London, a veterinarian oncologist at Ohio State University, noted: "It's much easier to cause cancer in mice than it is in people. So it may be that what you're seeing in mice represents an exaggerated phenomenon of what may occur in people." London suggested a 20-year study of chipped canines was needed "to see if you have a biological effect." Specialists from several pre-eminent cancer institutions have supported such testing before microchips are implanted on a large scale in humans.

Future applications

Contrary to popular belief, a GPS-enabled chip, for GPS tracking of individuals, does not yet exist— mainly due to problems with power consumption and antenna performance. Many news sources and websites have confused implantable chips with wearable or portable tracking devices.

Theoretically, a GPS-enabled chip could make it possible for individuals to be physically located by latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, and direction of movement. This could aid authorities in locating missing persons and/or fugitives and those who fled from a crime scene. VeriChip is one of the companies working on a GPS-capable chip.[6] Governments may use microchips for mass surveillance.[7]

Microchips Implant (animal)

Microchip implant (animal)






A microchip implant is an identifying integrated circuit placed under the skin of a dog, cat, or other animal. The chips are about the size of a large grain of rice and are based on a passive RFID technology.
Tattooing is another, older method for identifying animals.

Microchip implant in a cat



Uses and benefits

Microchips have been particularly useful in the return of lost pets. They can also assist where the ownership of an animal is in dispute.
Animal shelters and animal control centers benefit from microchipping by more quickly and efficiently returning pets to their owners. When a pet can be quickly matched to its owner, the shelter avoids the expense of housing, feeding, providing medical care, and outplacing or euthanizing the pet. Microchipping is becoming increasingly standard at shelters: many require all outplaced animals to receive a microchip, and provide the service as part of the adoption package.

In addition to shelters and veterinarians, microchips are used by kennels, breeders, brokers, trainers, registries, rescue groups, humane societies, clinics, farms, stables, animal clubs and associations, researchers and pet stores. Animal control officers are also trained and equipped to scan animals.

Several countries require a microchip when importing an animal, as a proof that the animal and the vaccination record belong together.
Microchip tagging may be required for CITES-regulated international trade in certain rare animals; for example, Asian Arowana are so tagged, in order to ensure that only captive-bred fish are imported.


System of recovery

Effective pet identification and recovery depends on the following:

A pet owner either adopts a pet at a shelter that microchips some or all adoptee animals, or the owner with an existing pet brings it to a veterinarian (or a shelter) that provides the service.
The shelter or vet selects a microchip from their stock, makes a note of that chip's unique ID, and then inserts the chip into the animal.

Before sending the animal home, the vet or shelter performs a test scan on the animal. This helps ensure that the chip will be picked up by a scanner, and that its unique identifying number will be read correctly.

An enrollment form is completed with the chip number, the pet owner's contact information, the name and description of the pet, the shelter's and/or veterinarian's contact information, and an alternate emergency contact designated by the pet owner. (Some shelters or vets, however, choose to designate themselves as the primary contact, and take the responsibility of contacting the owner directly. This allows them to be kept informed about possible problems with the animals they place.) The form is then sent to the manufacturer of the chip to be entered into its database. This company typically provides not only the microchips, but a 24-hour, toll-free telephone service for pet recovery, good for the life of the pet.

Alternatively, the pet owner may enroll the pet and chip with one of several registries that accept any chip type, of which the American Kennel Club Companion Animal Registry[1] is an example in the U.S. In some countries a single official national database may be used.

The pet owner is also provided the chip ID and the contact information of the recovery service. This is often in the form of a collar tag imprinted with the chip ID and the recovery service's toll-free number, to be worn by the animal.

If the pet is lost or stolen, and is found by local authorities or taken to a shelter, it is scanned during intake to see if a chip exists. If one is detected, authorities call the recovery service and provide them the ID number, the pet's description, and the location of the animal. If the pet is wearing the collar tag, anyone who finds the pet can call the toll-free number, making it unnecessary to involve the authorities. (The owner can also preemptively notify the recovery service directly if a pet disappears. This is useful if the pet is stolen, and is taken to a vet who scans it and checks with the recovery service.)

The recovery service notifies the owner that the pet has been found, and where to go to recover the animal.

Many veterinarians perform test scans on microchipped animals every time the animal is brought in for care. This ensures the chip still performs properly. Vets sometimes use the chip ID as the pet's ID in their databases, and print this number on all outgoing paperwork associated with its services, such as receipts, test results, vaccination certifications, and descriptions of medical or surgical procedures.


Components of a microchip

Microchips are passive, or inert, RFID devices and contain no internal power source. They are designed so that they do not act until acted upon.

Three basic elements comprise most microchips: A silicon chip (integrated circuit); a core of ferrite wrapped in copper wire; and a small capacitor. The silicon chip contains the identification number, plus electronic circuits to relay that information to the scanner. The ferrite -- or iron -- core acts as a radio antenna, ready to receive a signal from the scanner. The capacitor acts as a tuner, forming a LC circuit with the antenna coil.

These components are encased in special biocompatible glass made from soda lime, and hermetically sealed to prevent any moisture or fluid entering the unit. Animals are not affected physically or behaviorally by the presence of a chip in their bodies.


Cross-compatibility and Standards Issues

Because RFID implants for pets have been available since the 1980's, with no new chip types introduced since 1996, one might expect that any scanner today considered suitable for shelter use would be able to read all common chip types, making it easy for a shelter to scan an incoming animal and reunite it with its owner.

As of 2007, however, there are still many scanners used in shelters that lack the ability to read one or more of the four common chip types. In some cases, scanner makers simply left out support for one or more of the well-known chip transmission protocols. Also, in the U.S. especially, many vets have implanted pets with chips of a type made deliberately difficult to read, and not every scanner maker has the secrets needed to read these.

In late 2005, the U.S. Congress[2] directed the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to work on bringing about a "system of open microchip technology" with "universal reading ability." Many realized this should involve working to find a way to deal with the AVID "Encrypted" microchip type, because all the other kinds are already Open Microchip Technology by their design, requiring no secrets to decode. But instead, APHIS proposed a rule establishing one specific Open chip type as the standard for dogs and cats in certain circumstances. This was controversial, because the type selected (ISO 11784/11785) was one not widely supported by the infrastructure of scanners in the U.S. at the time. About 180 spirited comments were submitted to the APHIS during a comment period ending in September of 2006.[3]

The two companies which dominate the U.S. market -- AVID and HomeAgain -- both sell microchips which are optimized to operate at a frequency of 125 kHz. This allows the scanner of one manufacturer to detect the presence of its competitor's microchip -- even if it cannot actually decode the chip's encoded or encrypted ID. Some scanners manufactured by Digital Angel/Destron Corp. and distributed by HomeAgain for shelter use have for some time been able to both detect and decrypt the AVID "encrypted" ID chip.[4] Digital Angel/Destron Corp. seems to have been the first, after AVID itself, to join the group of manufacturers who have the secrets needed to recover the registration codes from these chips. Still, some of the Digital Angel/Destron models, (often those used by vets rather than shelters) may only flash an acknowledgment that an AVID chip has been found, with no number given. AVID's base scanner model circa 2006, however, doesn't even bother to give an indication of the presence of a chip of the type used by HomeAgain, even through no secrets are needed to fully decode these. A more deluxe AVID scanner model reads both kinds.[5]

But in most countries outside the U.S., pets are now commonly implanted with microchips made according to the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, standards 11784 and 11785, which call for a design frequency of 134.2 kHz. Other types may still be found in some areas.[6]

The idea that mere frequencies are a main component of the universal scanner problem may be disinformation from the "microchip wars." All the common pet chip types operate at the frequency used by the scanner as long as it's suitably close to its tuned frequency. A compromise excitation frequency can be used. In its APHIS submission, even AVID confirmed that a compromise excitation frequency can be and has been used, mentioning 128 kHz,[7] but implied that it's hopeless to achieve good performance with it. Others would say, more important than frequency is whether the scanner maker chooses to support all the published open protocols applicable to common pet chip types, and whether she has the secrets necessary to deal with obfuscation-encrypted chips. It has been suggested that the AVID "encrypted" chip has obfuscation encryption rather than authentication encryption, because although secrets are needed to build a scanner to extract its original label code, enough information to make a clone or counterfeit (indistinguishable from the original by the AVID scanner) can be gathered just by "listening" to it for a short time. An experimenter's project[8] has been offered illustrating this.

In 2004, when Banfield Pet Hospitals began selling Crystal Tag microchips in the U.S. -- chips made by Switzerland-based DATAMARS, and following ISO standards -- not enough scanners were distributed to ensure that these chips could be detected. Customers were not aware that far fewer shelters and clinics were equipped to detect these chips than the common American types. Later Banfield advocated double-chipping.[9]

In 2007, when the AKC Companion Animal Registry entered the microchip distribution business, it chose [10] Trovan brand chips. This prompted some to warn[11] that these too were not fully readable by the American scanner infrastructure. One source [12] seems to indicate that many current scanner models don't read the Trovan type.

Are patents the holdup on universal scanners? It has been reported in several sources that AVID, and in some reports also Digital Angel Corp, hold patents on "125 kHz technology."[13] The specific U.S. patent number purported to cover 125 kHz technology is generally absent in these. One article[14] might look like an appropriate citation for an AVID 125 kHz patent, up to the point where it identifies the frequency of the products found to infringe on three patents of AVID as... 134.2 kHz. Might one of these three patents preclude any possible universal pet scanner regardless of the excitation frequency used? Another article[15] identifies the three patents. The first two patents listed are discussed only as covering "transponders," the implantable chips themselves, so they wouldn't be a problem for scanner designers. The third, number 5235326, [16] covers, along with some tag (transponder) claims, a wide variety of readers/scanners that contain something called "Mode Control Data" or use certain multi-step decoding methods. A universal single-frequency scanner that just listens simultaneously for all the common types of pet chips would seem not to need Mode Control Data or these multi-step methods, so it might be quite prudent for a scanner maker to not use them.

For those wishing to build an Open Microchip Technology scanner for all pet chip types, the numerous U.S. pets with the AVID "Encrypted" chip are a major obstacle. At least one Open Standards based work-around was submitted to the APHIS during its 2006 comment period.[17] Some may consider such schemes untidy, but work-arounds may be the only option for those who want to build a scanner for obfuscation-type chips and aren't a member of the small monopoly-group, or perhaps "cartel," of those who have the decryption algorithm's secrets. This group has formerly, through mid-2006 at least, not applied its secret knowledge to make scanners combining both obfuscation-type and ISO-type pet chip reading capabilities available in the U.S. Some people have complained[18] that AVID itself sold such a scanner in other countries while claiming it wasn't good enough to sell at home. Digital Angel/Destron Corp. reportedly [19] added ISO-chip detection capabilities, with no number readout, to its HomeAgain-distributed product only late in 2005. Then in its 2006 APHIS comment, it announced plans for shipping universal units that will fully decode the ISO-chip in 2007.[20] Even this belated change may be a reaction to recent (2006) additions to the group. This may include the European manufacturer Trovan, even though its decrypting [21] multi-scanner was little known in the U.S. until the AKC-CAR began distributing it in 2007. More prominent may be the news that AVID's arch-rival Datamars seems to have gotten the secrets somehow and used them in its "Black Label" [22] scanner.

Some may view this expansion of the cartel as quite benign; indeed, it may lead to the availability of multiple brands of scanners each able to read encrypted type, ISO type, HomeAgain type, and Trovan type pet chips. Others might protest that this group has done nothing to earn its competitive advantage over non-members except that its leader marketed an unsuitable pet identification product, a dog tag made deliberately hard for the Good-Samaritan pet finder to read.

The mid-2007 recommendations of the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to Congress [23] could be seen as a significant victory for the encryption cartel; after months of studying proposals for bringing the encrypted microchips into compliance with the Open Microchip Technology directive, APHIS endorsed only a strategy of waiting for patents to expire. This plan might be expected to have disappointing results for those willing to wait, because patents aren't what keeps Open Technology scanners from reading these chips. The encryption/decryption algorithm is a secret; patents are public records. AVID's ability to keep the algorithm secret doesn't depend on the lifetime of any patent. It may be worthwhile to note that the scanners found to infringe on AVID patent rights in 2006 [24] were not decrypting scanners, although they might appear to have been imprudently designed.

The industry seems to agree that before ISO chips are more widely distributed in the U.S., scanners that can read the chips should be widely distributed first, and a transition strategy should be in place.


Implant location

In dogs and cats, chips are usually inserted below the skin at the back of the neck, between the shoulder blades on the dorsal midline. Continental European pets may be an exception; they get the implant in the left side of the neck, according to one reference.[25] The chip can often be manually detected by the owner by gently feeling the skin in that area. It stays in place as thin layers of connective tissue form around the biocompatible glass which encases it.
Horses are microchipped on the left side of the neck, half the distance between the poll and withers, and approximately one inch below the midline of the mane, into the nuchal ligament.
Birds' microchips are injected into their breast muscles. Because proper restraint is necessary, the operation requires two people -- an avian veterinarian and a trained assistant.


Animal species

Many species of animals have been microchipped, including birds, horses, llamas, alpacas, goats, sheep, miniature pigs, rabbits, deer, ferrets, snakes, lizards, alligators, turtles, toads, frogs, rare fish, mice, and prairie dogs -- even whales and elephants. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service uses microchipping in its research of wild bison, black-footed ferrets, grizzly bears, elk, white-tailed deer, giant land tortoises and armadillos.


World-wide use

Microchips are not in universal use, but there are legal requirements in some jurisdictions, such as the state of New South Wales, Australia. Some countries, such as Japan, require ISO-compliant microchips on dogs and cats being brought into the country, or for the person bringing the pet into the country to also bring a microchip reader that can read the non-ISO-compliant microchip. [26]

In New Zealand, all dogs first registered after 1 July 2006 are to be microchipped. Farmers protested that farm dogs should be exempt, drawing a parallel to the Dog Tax War of 1898. [27]. Farm dogs were exempted from microchipping in an amendment to the legislation passed in June 2006. [28]

Microchips Technology

Microchip Technology (NASDAQ: MCHP)
is a manufacturer of microcontroller, memory and analog semiconductors, founded in 1989 when a group of venture capitalists acquired Microchip from General Instrument. Its products include microcontrollers (PICmicro, dsPIC / PIC24), Serial EEPROM devices, KEELOQ devices, radio frequency (RF) devices, thermal, power and battery management analog devices, as well as linear, interface and mixed signal devices.
Corporate Headquarters is located at Chandler, Arizona with wafer fabs in Tempe, Arizona and Gresham, Oregon.
Among its chief competitors are Atmel, Infineon, Freescale, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and Maxim Integrated Products.
Microchip is a major sponsor of the FIRST, supplying most of the major electrical components in each kit as standard parts.