SOUTHWEST FLORIDA - WINK News told you about a project underway right now to microchip people. So far, it's geared toward Alzheimer's patients who might wander away, but as reporter Maggie Crane uncovered, more than just patients are choosing to microchip themselves.

She went to West Palm Beach, where what sounds like science fiction has now become science fact. A perfectly healthy 38-year-old man has decided to get chipped, and after hearing about the new tracking technology, a local family tells WINK News they'd like to microchip their mother.

You can't see it. You can barely feel it. George Tokesky conceals a microchip, embedded under his skin, beneath his suit. It was his choice to have it put in, and you'd never know it was even there unless this avid boater says his life depended on it.

It's called a VeriChip. It verifies your medical information when you can't.

"The VeriChip is there to give me some peace of mind that at least if something happens out in the ocean -- I'm not going to have my wallet, I'm not going to have any identification on me, I'm probably just going to be in my swimming trunks with nothing on me -- but the VeriChip will be there should something come up," Tokesky says.

Tokesky is part of a trial group to test the new technology over two years.

Most of the people who have microchips are patients at Palm Beach County's Alzheimer's Care Facility, where the president there says 60 percent of patients will wander away sometime during their illness.

"They'll be sitting in their living room and then this black out occurs, and then they'll look around and they have not got a clue where they are," Mary Barnes, Alzheimer's Care Facility President and CEO, says. "Of the 90 percent of patients that are found dead, they're found dead within five miles of their home."

Barnes says Alzheimer's patients don't exactly wander. Instead, she says, they're on a mission. In the case of Genoveva Colon, her mission took her 20 miles from her North Fort Myers home.

"She went to Punta Gorda. Walking," Yolanda Colon, Genoveva's daughter and caregiver, says. "I think she thought she was in Puerto Rico."

The people who found her brought her back.

"She's already got lost a couple of times, and you know you never know what could happen to her," Carmen Colon, Genoveva's daughter and caregiver, says through tears.

"I'm stressed all of the time," Yolanda adds. "I don't know when I'm going to get a call that something happened to her."

Now Genoveva wears a Project Lifesaver tracking bracelet, at least, sometimes.

"This bracelet could get lost, and she takes it off. We have to be watching her all the time because she'll take it off," Yolanda says. "She says it bothers her."

Now the Colon family wants to get on board with the Palm Beach Project, putting the same radio frequency that's stored in the bracelet on a microchip inside their mother. That way, if she ever goes missing again, the embedded chip can take a search team straight to her as long as she's within about a mile of the tracking device.

"I don't have to be worried when she might disappear one day and never come back," Carmen says.

Other people we talked to say they'd consider putting the chips in their children so they know where they are at all times.

Right now the FDA-approved microchip technology really only works in Palm Beach County where hospitals are equipped with scanners to detect the chips if a person goes missing.