A Spanish dancer named Moon Ribas has a chip in her arm connected to seismic sensors, which is triggered when there are tremors anywhere on the planet. She uses it in a performance art piece called Waiting for Earthquakes. Neil Harbisson, a colorblind artist from Northern Ireland, has an antennalike sensor in his head that lets him “hear” colors. And Rich Lee, from St. George, Utah, has spent about $15,000 developing a cyborg sex toy he calls the Lovetron 9000, a vibrating device to be implanted in the pelvis. Lee hasn’t sold (or used) the Lovetron yet, but he’s got magnetic implants in his fingertips to pick up metal objects, two microchips in his hands that can send messages to phones, and a biothermal sensor in his forearm to measure temperature. “We’re the first movers,” Lee says. “But as the technology becomes more mainstream, there will be potential uses for pretty much everybody.”…

Digiwell’s microchip implants run from $40 to $250, and Kramer charges $30 to inject them, either in his Hamburg office or while traveling (he did Geronimo’s implant in the lobby of a Berlin hotel). His clients include a lawyer who wants access to confidential files without remembering a password, a teen with no arms who uses a chip in her foot to open doors, and an elderly man with Parkinson’s disease who once collapsed in front of his house after trying for two hours to get his key into the lock. He now uses a chip in his hand to open the door.