An employee of technology development firm Sogeti has used a near-field communication (NFC) chip inserted in his hand to pass through security at Stockholm Arlanda Airport in Sweden.
Andreas Sjöström, vice president, digital, Sogeti, inserted the NFC chip containing his Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) EuroBonus member ID using a kit and syringe supplied by radio-frequency identification (RFID) specialists Dangerous Things.
Stockholm Arlanda Airport contains NFC readers all the way from security to the gate enabling Sjöström to use the chip instead of a digital boarding pass. SAS provides its EuroBonus Gold members with NFC tags that contain their details in an encrypted format, allowing them to expedite the boarding process. Working with SAS, Sjöström was able to transfer the information from one of the tags onto a chip suitable for insertion under the skin on his hand.
Sjöström has stated that the demonstration was purely for experimental purposes and that there are no plans of actual public implementation.
Sjöström said, “I don’t think many would consider implanting a simple NFC-chip to solve a scenario involving only boarding passes. I travel frequently and I rarely find managing my already digital boarding pass, in my phone, a problem. However, other types of biometric technology will most likely be relevant to solve authentication and identification challenges in the future. We don’t need implants for that. Some non-intrusive examples include fingerprint, heart beat and pulse analysis [and] iris recognition.”
To watch a YouTube video about Sjöström’s experiment click here.