Photos: New Smart Tats Take Health Tracking to the Next Level

When Ben Lamm realized wearable health trackers lasted longer on users' shelves than on their actual bodies, he had a bright idea—create "biowearables" that can't just be thrown into your sock drawer, forever buried beneath dust bunnies and guilt.

That's when Chaotic Moon Studios was born. The Austin, Texas–based startup creates "tech tats," skin-mounted chipsets that, when combined with conductive paint, can collect, store, send and receive data while staying on the human body in the form of a tattoo. Through a chipset of Chaotic Moon's own design, the tech tat is incorporated into a personalized tattoo design. Once "printed," the tattoo is applied to the skin, and through an app, monitors heart rate, blood pressure and other bodily functions.

"This is really going beyond what the fitness tracker is," says Eric Schneider, Chaotic Moon's creative technologist for hardware, adding that the concept may also hold promise for the medical field. "There's a lot of monitoring devices that take up a lot of room and space."