Former DARPA head Regina Dugan now leads special projects for the Google-owned Motorola, and she claims to be very excited about wearable computers. By that she doesn’t necessarily mean something so pedestrianly futuristic as Google Glass or a smartwatch. Dugan means electronic tattoos and pills. “We got to do a lot of epic shit when I was at DARPA,” Dugan said onstage at D11. But the stuff she is working on at Motorola is pretty cool (and totally creepy!) too: An electronic tattoo that can be used to authenticate a user instead of some flimsy password. It’s made by a company called MC10 that Motorola is partnering with, and Dugan is wearing it on her own arm. Another option in a similar vein: Vitamin authentication. Dugan shows a pill that can be ingested and then battery-powered with stomach acid to produce an 18-bit internal signal. After that, the swallower’s whole body becomes a password.
