"Digital jewelry" can help you solve problems like forgotten passwords and security badges. These devices have a tiny processor and unique identifiers that interact with local sensors.
The Java Ring is one such device, made by Dallas Semiconductor. It made its debut at the JavaOne Conference, and it is currently in use at Celebration School, a forward-thinking institution near Orlando, Florida. The ring itself is made of stainless steel and contains an "iButton," a 1-million-transistor processor, 32K of ROM, and 134K of RAM. The ring runs a Java-based process that recognizes when it has been plugged into a sensor socket (called a "Blue Dot receptor" by the manufacturer) and performs the function designated by that socket. The interaction is logged and stored on the school's computer network. Students use the rings to open doors, register at roll calls, and buy food off debit accounts.
Digital jewelry can come in other forms as well. Innovators at IBM and the MIT Media Laboratory have developed "personal area networks" (PANs) that transfer simple information via human touch, by "capacitively coupling picoamp currents through the body." A low-level electric current carries the information from transmitter to receiver, passing simple identifying information like name, title, and phone number. As digital jewelry matures, this kind of function is a natural inclusion to the feature set. Other possible inclusions are memory aids, PDA functions, and environmental augmentation.
Of course, digital jewelry opens a slew of other problems. We may have condensed the contents of your pocket to a small device, but what happens when it's lost, stolen, or (God forbid) stomped into pico-bits by the school bully? Some problems just never go away.
Digital jewelry is arguably a halfway stage between our current level of technology integration and the "cyborg" status famously promoted by Professor Kevin Warwick in the article "Cyborg 1.0" in the February 2000 issue of Wired magazine. Warwick, head of the Cybernetics Department at the University of Reading, had a chip and antenna, enclosed in a small glass capsule, implanted into his arm in August 1998. This device effectively served as a Java Ring, opening doors and interacting with computers in the university offices.
In 2001, the professor, dubbed "Captain Cyborg" by the press, had another chip implanted into his wrist, this one with 100 individual wires that were inserted into the median nerve to feed data to an external jack. The 2001 experiment was intended to provide data about human touch and motor control.
Warwick's devices are hard to replicate or lose, but few users are willing to go to the same level of pain and self-mutilation to make their digital lives easier. For now, digital jewelry is a good solution, and the issues of replacement and inconvenience will continue to go hand-in-hand with the compact size and utility of digital jewelry.
