Concern over their daughter’s safety, following the recent murder of two 10-year-olds, have led her parents to allow a controversial British cybernetics expert to implant a tracking device in her, British media reports said on Tuesday.
Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University, said he had received requests from the parents of at least six other children.
Danielle Duvall (11) could have the device implanted by Christmas, after her parents became anxious about her safety following the murders in early August of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells.
They went missing from the village of Soham in Cambridgeshire. Their bodies were found two weeks later and the caretaker of their school arrested and charged with murder.
The device, costing about $30, will probably use a mobile phone network or global positioning system, to pinpoint the child.
The implants would be two to three centimetres long.
”A potential abductor wouldn’t know the child had the device and it could be switched off to sleep mode when it wasn’t needed to conserve its battery,” Warwick said.
He acknowledged there might be ethical considerations, but anxious parents are unlikely to be concerned at such niceties.
Wendy Duval, Danielle’s mother, said the Soham deaths had motivated her decision to allow her daughter to be the first to undergo the procedure.
”I think it’s just to make sure your children are safe. It’s a shame you have to go to these lengths to keep your children safe but I would rather do that than have anything happen to her,” she said.
Danielle agreed. ”I’ll feel so much safer. I’ll know my mum knows where I am,” she said.
In March this year Warwick (48) underwent an operation to install implants in his arm that can read electrical impulses coursing through his nerves, immediately gaining for himself the sobriquet Professor Cyborg.
He hopes his work will ultimately help patients with serious nerve damage, like Superman actor Christopher Reeve, who has suffered damage to his spinal cord.
Surgeons implanted a silicon square about three millimetres wide into an incision in Warwick’s left wrist and hammered its 100 electrodes, each as thin as a hair, into the median nerve.
Connecting wires were fed under the skin of the forearm and out from a skin puncture and the wounds were sewn up. The wires will be linked to a transmitter/receiver device which would relay nerve
messages to a computer by radio signal.
Other experts in the field have said Warwick’s talents in self-promotion exceed his skills in electronics. – Sapa-DPA