FRANKFURT — Patrick Paumen doesn’t have to worry about forgetting his keys and being locked out of his apartment. That’s because he no longer needs a key. He unlocks the door with a wave of his hand.The 32-year-old IT expert and resident of the Dutch city of Heerlen is one of a growing number of people with electronic implants under their skins, mostly for use as keys or identification.Paumen has several of these implants or tags embedded in the fatty tissue of his hands and lower arm. He uses them to unlock not his apartment door, his office and the gate to the secure parking lot at work. Another stores information he would otherwise put on a business card — name and contact details — and yet another holds similar information for nonbusiness encounters.The implants can be activated and scanned by readers that use radio-frequency identification technology, or RFID. Those include ordinary smartphones and readers already installed in office buildings to allow entrance with a common ID...
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