Man voluntarily receives under-skin RFID chip implant live at MWC show floor

A man volunteered to have a chip inserted under his skin live on stage at a trade fair in Barcelona on Monday, and another man who had already undergone the procedure showed off how he could make a payment with it using his smartphone.Edgar Pons said he decided to have the radio frequency identification (RFID) chip implanted because it contained credentials to open the door to his house.[caption id="attachment_6154481" align="alignnone" width="1280"]

A man stands beside a sign at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Image: Reuters[/caption]“It is super, for me, very useful, because I have an automatic house,” he said, adding he was further motivated by the fact he could “withdraw it very easily, simply making a little cut and pressing it”.As Pons was undergoing the procedure, Alex Rodriguez Vitello, a physicist, engineer, curator and explorer at Barcelona-based technology company Alpha, said:“The chip is the size of a grain of sand or two and it’s covered in a material that is biocompatible so our body doesn’t degrade it over time.”During the presentation at the Mobile World Congress, organised by Spanish bank Sabadell, a man named Pau who had already been fitted with a chip, made a payment by placing his smartphone over the skin covering the chip.“(What) we have been seeing now is what the future of payments could be,” said Anna Puigoriol, a financial services manager at Sabadell.Please head to our MWC 2019 page for all news related to the event