Idea for implantable storage device

Hi. So I got my NFC implant about a year ago and ever since then I have been thinking about how cool it would be to be able to implant a device with enough storage capacity to be useful for things other than storing a key. I definitely don't have the technical knowledge to create this, but maybe by putting this idea out here someone who does will see it and be inspired.

My idea is to connect a microSD card to a low power bluetooth chip and inductive antenna then encase it in silicone. I'm guessing something to regulate voltage and a capacitor would also be needed?

Thoughts?

How feasible would this be?
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  • About as difficult as wiring up 6 wires from an microsd card to a microcontroller. Implanted microcontroller are no news, bluetooth was demonstrated too.
  • Huh. I figured that there must be more to it otherwise it'd have been done already.
  • With storage implants it always comes down to a matter of practicality.
    Let's say you can make/obtain an implant like this. What would it take to interface with it? I've seen Bluetooth flashdrives that can wirelessly transfer data, but they also need a power source.

    If you aren't too keen on charging yourself every once in a while, then you will need some sort of special cable/appartus in order to wirelessly power it when you want to transfer files.

    If you need to carry around a special cable just to transfer files, why not just carry a flash drive?

    There are some advantages I guess. If you had some super duper ultra top secret files you needed to physically bring with you then yes, perhaps something like this would makes sense.
  • I was thinking just power it while in use. Possibly even make a phone case with a built in Qi charger. It would be a neat way to transfer files between phones and maybe even kind of like an implantable pirate box.
  • "Whoa, you have a 1 gigabyte hard drive?! You're never going to run out of space!"
    I said that to my cousin in 2000. Implanting storage isn't a long-term investment. 

    If security is your issue adding rfid verification to your existing protocol is already a thing and it comes in a neat little glass ampoule ready for injection. I use an implanted RFID tag to log into my work computer as a second step on top of my regular password. You can buy external hard drives which use RFID to unlock. You can buy gun cases which unlock with RFID and keep a flash drive in there.

    If you just want to have a chunk of memory on you at all times ask yourself what you have that is so dire. Is it something that can be kept on a USB drive worn around your neck? Can you just store it in your phone? Why can't you keep in in dropbox?
  • @JohnOlson, The novelty of such a device sounds quite cool. But once again, think about practicality. If you need to have it powered every time you are using it, that means that you will have to keep your phone on top of it as you are transferring the files.

    Also, storage can be kind of tricky because some other things must be taken into account. Longevity is one of them. I am assuming that you will not want to have to have the implant removed for a good long time. In that time storage will advance, things will get bigger, faster,etc. Not a huge issue but something to be aware of. Even in the last 5 years, flash drives have been moving in leaps and bounds. That isn't a hugely pressing issue though, it will take a while before a half terabyte micro sd card is considered to be "small" amount of storage.

    Another thing to take into consideration is transfer speed. Bluetooth isn't exactly slow, but it isn't super speedy either. At most it looks like BT4.0 can handle speeds of 25 Megabits per second. (Keep in mind there are 8 megabits in a megabyte. 

    Depending on what you want to store that may not be a huge issue. Let's say you want to hold a 3.5Gb movie. If you do the math that means it would take around 20 minutes to transfer. (Now that I say that it doesn't seem to bad actually) However, that also means that you would have to keep your phone over the implant for 20 minutes. Being the klutz I am I would probably knock it off my accident or something. 

    With something just like a text file though, it probably wouldn't be an issue. Perhaps multiple ways to power it? Phone case for on the go, and cable for home?

    And of course, what if things go wrong? I have had many flash drives corrupt on me for no apparent reason. Obviously I can format them and everything is fine and dandy, but what if I couldn't? Say your implant corrupts, would there be a way to recover the data and it's usage? I'm not too sure.

    At this point, you could always buy a phone with a microSD card slot, but that is definitely not as cool.
     
    I would love to see something like this made, but just some food for thought.
  • internal storage starts to become really interesting once you have a neural interface in your implant which allows you to communicate with your implant without additional devices. implanting a 64GB microsd card preloaded with the entirety of wikipedia-text could prove useful.
  • More than useful, I'd say. It's like having a library at your beck and call, without all the books. If the biggest wikipedia article you can expect to read is around 1k KB (I used the HTML document for the article on Lasers(~500 Kb) and guesstimated the size of all the pictures), or .001 GB, you could store over 64,000 articles. College on a chip. 

    As a side note, just because storage tech advances, it doesn't mean that we have to upgrade our implant right then and there.
  • edited January 2016
    Given pictures can not be parsed via an internal neuro interface (at least not nowhere near feasible atm) you can safely go with the raw-text. The entirety of the english wikipedia article text compressed is around 12GB atm. Leaves plenty of space for literature of choice like manuals, textbooks, research articles etc. And if you are not satisfied with that. get a 128GB card, or multiples. They have a chip-select pin so you can easily wire up multiple ones in parallel. Might be good in case one of them fails, never hurts to have some backup at hands (pun intended).
    Enough storage to keep reading while observing the come and go of the last couple of ice ages on our planet.
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