I've had two tiny disc magnet implants in two fingers for over three years now. I originally had it implanted as part of an idea for a novel man-machine interface I came up with for my Master's degree research project at the Uni of Reading (UK).
The early reports of electrical fields inducing sensations had intrigued me, so I set out to explore the possibility of controlling the magnet with an external electromagnet, which in my final design was a simple coil ring worn around the finger, and use it as a sensory substitution man-machine interface. After measuring the frequency response, sensitivity etc characteristics, I finally put it into a practical application demo by using the interface to couple an ultrasonic ranger and a mobile phone to myself. The ultrasonic ranger was used to feed the distance information and I learnt pretty quickly to judge distances and move about with my eyes closed. In the phone scenario, I encoded characters as Morse Code pulses and could "read" the incoming text messages. My morse skills weren't that good but it worked!
The internalization of the sensory information, with the magnet being inside the body, made a qualitative subjective difference as opposed to simply having a magnet glued to the finger.
My best experience with real world magnetic fields? Wires. It was mind blowing to be able to feel the field around a wire which we usually think nothing of. The power cable to the electric heater generated a field I could "touch" about 4-5 inches away! What does touching it feel like? Like touching a stream of air. :)
The early reports of electrical fields inducing sensations had intrigued me, so I set out to explore the possibility of controlling the magnet with an external electromagnet, which in my final design was a simple coil ring worn around the finger, and use it as a sensory substitution man-machine interface. After measuring the frequency response, sensitivity etc characteristics, I finally put it into a practical application demo by using the interface to couple an ultrasonic ranger and a mobile phone to myself. The ultrasonic ranger was used to feed the distance information and I learnt pretty quickly to judge distances and move about with my eyes closed. In the phone scenario, I encoded characters as Morse Code pulses and could "read" the incoming text messages. My morse skills weren't that good but it worked!
The internalization of the sensory information, with the magnet being inside the body, made a qualitative subjective difference as opposed to simply having a magnet glued to the finger.
There's a bit of info on this and pictures/xrays on my blog: http://www.jawish.org/blog/plugin/tag/smii. The details on the interface is on the paper we published: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5898...
My best experience with real world magnetic fields? Wires. It was mind blowing to be able to feel the field around a wire which we usually think nothing of. The power cable to the electric heater generated a field I could "touch" about 4-5 inches away! What does touching it feel like? Like touching a stream of air. :)