The man is sitting there, minding his own business — and suddenly a signal. Emergency surgery. He gets up and goes.
That's this. Except now it's two-way, works via satellite, and fits in an ordinary bank card.
No phone. Everywhere.
Everyone keeps a pile of apps on one device. We are simply used to it — and it is genuinely convenient. Five years ago I thought: what if we did the opposite? Apps live on their own, each in a small card the size of a credit card.
Back then I did not yet know what it would be good for. Later I figured it out. But five years ago the technologies that exist today were not there — so this is a very old project that has only now become real.
85.6 × 54 mm, slightly thicker than two bank cards. Inside: an e-ink screen with a touch keyboard, a processor, a secure crypto module, cellular and satellite modems, LoRa radio and a battery.
Phones die. Radios die. Everything runs out of battery. This thing keeps working. It needs charging once a week — and you never think about it: the card sits in your wallet, and the wallet holds a battery that charges the cards inductively, with no cables.
The card connects by itself. Not an accessory, not a dongle, not the other half of a smartphone.
It beeps right in your pocket. Read it, tap, reply.
Put it in the wallet and it charges itself. Harder to forget than a phone.
There is a connection everywhere: in a basement, in the mountains, in a field, in a crowd of 70,000. If one channel goes quiet, the card takes the next.
The primary channel. Penetrates buildings and basements — where an ordinary phone has already gone silent.
Direct card-to-card link with no network at all. Goes through walls and floors; kilometres in open terrain.
Where terrestrial networks simply do not exist: mountains, sea, desert, disaster zones.
A card without coverage is never alone. It hands the message to a neighbour, that one to the next, and so on until it reaches a card with a way out to the world. Every card is both a subscriber and a relay.
The more cards nearby, the stronger everyone's connection. At a trade show, in a plant, at an emergency site the network assembles itself — no towers, no setup.
Each card runs its own software. One device, different purposes — and a person usually carries several.
Two-way pager for emergency services
Connecting attendees of a large event
A self-contained cold wallet
Condition monitoring and emergency call
On-board neural chip — analysis on the card itself
A senior dispatcher sits with an ordinary messenger app. In the group are his people — police officers, for example. Something has happened somewhere and he says so. It does not matter whether they have signal, whether the radios work, whether the phone is alive — this is the fallback that always works.
Unlike old pagers, it works both ways. Message received — reply sent. You can write to the dispatcher or to a colleague directly. The dispatcher may see your location, or may not: that is a setting.
The same thing: pull everyone in from wherever they are, alert them, send them to the fire, get confirmation — arrived or not.
We all remember House: a man is sitting quietly, minding his own business, his pager goes off — emergency surgery. It used to mean calling somebody back. Now he answers straight from the card: on my way, can't make it, sending a colleague.
There can be a great many such services — I do not even know them all. We need to launch and see how it works in the field.
I have been to an event like that. More than 70,000 people — finding someone is genuinely impossible. You run around, nobody needs you, while you need specific people with specific projects. There are communities of sorts, but they work sometimes and sometimes they do not.
The idea is simple: along with the badge, each attendee gets our card. It has a connection everywhere — cellular, satellite, mesh between the cards. Attendees who do not even know each other's names can get in touch. And if they want to reveal who they are, that is entirely up to them.
Looking for someone — the card tells you: he is at aisle 48.
Every crypto wallet is small, and every one of them has to talk to a phone — over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Our card is fully autonomous. Logically it is a cold wallet that is always with you and always online on its own.
It gets more interesting. With a bank partnership it becomes a universal card: fiat and crypto on one piece of plastic. Convert crypto to fiat and withdraw cash from an ATM right away. Instead of keeping money in a bank, keep it in your own cold wallet.
There are a great many people with conditions, and not all of them carry a phone or a watch. The card simply sits in the wallet.
It can measure balance: whether the person is unsteady or not. That is a reliable marker in a whole range of neurological conditions — Parkinson's, post-stroke states, age-related problems where people fall. The card raises an emergency call and sends a message — to the doctor, to the family, to a medical platform.
And the key point about older people: they forget to charge the phone, they leave things everywhere. But the wallet is always carried — and in it lies not one card but several, each with its own function.
Glucose meters often get left at home. A card that is always in the wallet is harder to forget. It does not diagnose and does not prescribe: it tells the person right on the screen that a reading looks abnormal, advises them to re-check and contact their doctor — and lets them send the number to that doctor with a couple of taps.
The cost of missing it is not inconvenience. Hypoglycaemia ends in loss of consciousness, a head injury and intensive care. Warning the person before that moment is the whole point of the card.
Small inference chips already sit in almost every flagship phone. Nothing stops us from putting one in a card.
The chip goes into the health card and looks at every measured parameter at once: how the person walks, how they breathe, how their voice sounds, what the glucose is, what the temperature is. Taken together, it catches signs of illness or a flare-up before the person notices it themselves.
Then the card contacts the physician or the medical centre. It takes the rough measurements upon itself and gives not a diagnosis but a risk assessment: re-check, take something sweet, sit down, call someone.
Exactly what to monitor and at what accuracy is a conversation to have with doctors: which parameters can realistically be measured by what fits inside a small card. But it certainly needs to be done.
A wallet with a built-in battery charges every card inside it — inductively, with no cables and no connectors. Put the cards back in their place and they are charged. The charging ritual does not exist.
The idea is old; the technology is new. Chips that combine ultra-low power, satellite connectivity and a real processor within the thickness of a card have appeared only just now. That is why a project conceived five years ago has become real only today.