Heart scan: Soon unlock your PC, smartphone with your heart

While most of the known biometric security features that are currently provided on smartphones and laptops are inconvenient, they are presently unavoidable. You need to step in, place your finger or tap a series of alphanumeric keys or swipe in a pattern to get past its security and enter into your system. The new security system recently introduced by Samsung and Apple (though it’s not really new) is the face recognition system which still needs you to stare into your camera to log on.

To make things a little easier and less strenuous, a few researchers have managed to unlock the PC by doing nothing but simply stand in front of it. It does not use facial recognition, but instead, it uses the size of the human (user’s) heart to detect your presence.

Researchers at the University of Buffalo have unlocked a new, non-contact, remote biometric tool that could be the next advancement in computer security. The team has developed a computer security system using the dimensions of your heart as your identifier. The system uses low-level Doppler radar to measure your heart, and then continually monitors your heart to make sure no one else has stepped in to run your computer.

The system is a safe and potentially more effective alternative to passwords and other biometric identifiers, claim the researchers. It may eventually be used for smartphones and at airport screening barricades. The signal strength of the system’s radar is much less than Wi-Fi, and therefore doesn’t pose any health threat. The reader is about 5 milliwatts, which is lower than 1 per cent of the radiation from usual smartphones, and it needs about 8 seconds to scan a heart for the first time. Thereafter, the monitor can continuously keep recognising that heart. The system, which was three years in the making, uses the geometry of the human heart. The shape and size, and how it moves, is used to make an identification.

‘No two people with identical hearts have ever been found, and people’s hearts do not change shape, unless they suffer from serious heart disease,’ claims their research.

Heart-based biometrics systems have been in use for almost a decade, primarily with electrodes measuring electrocardiogram signals. The new system has several advantages over current biometric tools, like fingerprints and retinal scans. It is a passive, non-contact device, so users are not bothered with authenticating themselves whenever they log-in. And second, it monitors users constantly. In short, the computer won’t operate if another person is in front of it, making it easier for people so that they do not have to remember to log-off when they are away from their PCs.

The researcher plans to miniaturise the system and have it installed onto the corners of computer keyboards, and could also be used for user identification on cell phones. At airports, a similar device could monitor a person up to 30 meters away.

The technology is described in a paper that the inventors will be presenting at next month’s 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Communication (MobiCom) in Utah.