It turns out, yes. Every single one of them works as if they were on top of the skin, rather than under it. Skin proved to be of little hindrance to bluetooth, and embedded (quite literally, in this case) devices could maintain a connection with little trouble. They were even able to charge the device by using induction across two coils, much like those charging mats charge your phone.
You might think this type of technology unnecessarily ghoulish. But there are some serious advantages to integrating gadgets with the human body. Said Holtz, "The device is always there. You cannot lose it."
You can also use such devices to augment your senses in ways that feel completely natural. Imagine, for example, a small vibration motor underneath your skin that vibrates any time you get a message, with a multi-color LED that lights up blue for a text message, green for a calendar reminder, and yellow for a call. Or imagine setting an alarm to wake you up at 6 AM using only gentle vibrations.
All that is just with a single vibration motor and a single LED.
While it might seem far-fetched that we could integrate deeply with a machine, it really isn’t. This is actually an area that has seen a fair amount of research. Wired had a great article about it half a decade ago. In the article, they describe something called the FeelSpace belt, a belt with a digital compass and a bunch of vibration motors on it. The wearer would wear the belt all day, every day, and the motors would continually vibrate in the direction that was North.
What the researchers found was that the sense of direction quickly became accepted as a natural part of the body. You could be more than a hundred miles from your home and point out its direction, and the wearer could navigate cities with only a cursory walkthrough. the author of the article even mentioned an eerie dream he had where he dreamed North.
And we are already augmented beings, whether we like to think of ourselves that way or not. There are people out there who literally feel as if their phone were a limb. "People literally cannot be without this device," says Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They don't feel the same when they are not connected. We live with our phones as if they are part of our body."
And the perception that including machines in the body is unnatural will likely change, too. you don’t think anything of a pacemaker, for example, not of replacement hips or joints. Even glasses are an example of unnatural technology that we have integrated with ourselves.
So we may soon be entering a world where our next phone is in our arm, the speaker attached directly to the skull. How do you feel about that?