A Russian engineer has sliced open his own hand and embedded a transit chip under the skin to speed up his daily commute.
In a fairly gruesome piece of DIY surgery, Vlad Seitzef wrapped the chip from his Troika public transport card in silicon and slipped it under the skin on the back of his hand. The wound was sewn up using plastic thread, leaving an unsightly scar.
The operation was a success, but Zeitsef says some scanners still struggle to pick up the signal from the chip.
Undeterred, he intends to repeat the procedure on his other hand to implant the chip from his plastic credit card for use at contactless terminals when shopping.
Zeitsef is not the first to try out embedded RFID chips. Last year a dutch crypto-currency fanatic implanted two NFC tags under the skin in his hands to store his digital cash.