Hospitals and healthcare

Institutions

Implantable RFID chips designed for animal tagging are now being used in humans. An early experiment with RFID implants was conducted by British professor of cybernetics Kevin Warwick, who implanted a chip in his arm in 1998. In 2004 Conrad Chase offered implanted chips in his night clubs in Barcelona and Rotterdam to identify their VIP customers, who in turn use it to pay for drinks.

In 2004, the Mexican Attorney General's office implanted 18 of its staff members with the Verichip to control access to a secure data room.

Privacy advocates have protested against implantable RFID chips, warning of potential abuse and denouncing these types of RFID devices as "spychips", and that use by governments could lead to an increased loss of civil liberties and would lend itself too easily to abuse. One such case of this abuse would be in the microchip's dual use as a tracking device. Such concerns were justified in the United States, when the FBI program COINTELPRO was revealed to have tracked the activities of high profile political activist and dissident figures. There is also the possibility that the chip's information will be available to those other than governments, such as private business, thus giving employers highly personal information about employees. In addition, privacy advocates state that the information contained in this chip could easily be stolen, so that storing anything private in it would be to risk identity theft.

Hospitals and healthcare

Adoption of RFID in the medical industry has been widespread and very effective. Hospitals are among the first users to combine both active and passive RFID technology. Many successful deployments in the healthcare industry have been cited where active technology tracks high-value, or frequently moved items, where passive technology tracks smaller, lower cost items that only need room-level identification.

The trend is toward using ISO 18000-6c as the tag of choice and combining an active tagging system that relies on existing 802.11X wireless infrastructure for active tags.

Since 2004 a number of U.S. hospitals have begun implanting patients with RFID tags and using RFID systems, usually for workflow and inventory management. The use of RFID to prevent mixups between sperm and ova in IVF clinics is also being considered.

In October 2004, the FDA approved USA's first RFID chips that can be implanted in humans. The 134 kHz RFID chips, from VeriChip Corp. can incorporate personal medical information and could save lives and limit injuries from errors in medical treatments, according to the company. Anti-RFID activists Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre discovered an FDA Warning Letter that spelled out health risks. ^[51]. According to the FDA, these include "adverse tissue reaction", "migration of the implanted transponder", "failure of implanted transponder", "electrical hazards" and "magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] incompatibility."