Motorola once developed a swallowable password pill

For a brief period when Motorola Mobility was owned by Google, the company showed a swallowable "password pill" as a form of authentication. Yeah, 2013 was weird. The pill housed a small chip that would dissolve in the stomach and emit an 18-bit ECG-style signal through the body.

Regina Dugan, then head of research, said, “Essentially, your entire body becomes your authentication token.” Early tests could only confirm whether a person had taken the pill. As then-Motorola head Dennis Woodside put it, “This isn’t stuff that’s going to ship anytime soon, but I think having the boldness to think differently about problems that everybody has every day is really important for Motorola now.” Motorola worked with Proteus Digital Health, which already had FDA approval for an ingestible sensor as a medical device.

There was no price or nutritional information for the chips, but Dugan added, "We have demoed this working and authenticating a phone." The company also explored a password tattoo with MC10’s stretchable circuits.

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