Gadget Security Gets Even More Personal With a New Heartbeat Unlocking Wristband

A Toronto-based start-up company has this month unveiled the very latest in personalised gadget security – involving a wristband and its wearer’s heartbeat.

Biometric technology company Bionym have upped the security stakes with their new Nymi wristband, which uses the wearer’s Electrocardiogram (ECG) – or heartbeat – to validate a person’s identity.

To register their identity, the wearer must first place the Nymi on their wrist, before touching a sensor atop of the band for around two minutes, allowing it to capture their ECG autograph. To access a device, the wearer must then touch the same upper sensor again for several seconds, whilst a sensor in contact with the wrist examines their ECG.

Once validated, the band then uses Bluetooth to communicate with an app that is running on the device to be unlocked. Users can also integrate gestures such as waving, to correspond to different commands for different devices. When the wearer removes the Nymi band, however, all devices that are linked to it are automatically locked.

It is hoped that this new innovation in gadget security – which is currently on pre-sale for $79 in the US and Canada – will be able to unlock all iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS X devices by early 2014. It is also hoped that, in the future, it will be possible to unlock cars using heartbeat identification.

Bionym’s Nymi wristband was unveiled in the same month that tech giant Apple revealed that its new mobile device, the iPhone 5S, would user fingerprint technology as a hard-to-crack method of unlocking the phone. However the Chaos Computer Club, a Germany-based hacking group, have already made a claim that they have been able to bypass the phone’s new biometric lock. Meanwhile confident Bionym believe that their heartbeat unlocking technology will be virtually impossible to hack, thanks to its identification system being built on the workings of an internal organ.

Karl Martin, Bionym’s CEO told News Scientist: “We’ve known since the 1960s that the peaks and troughs in an individual’s heartbeat form a unique pattern, because of the differences in the heart’s position, shape and size.

“This means it can be used to identify a person and is harder to spoof than biometric systems that rely upon external features such as fingerprints, irises or facial patterns.”

So will you be looking to replace your multitude of gadget passwords with a ‘heartbeat key’? Or is this gadget security gone one step too far?

Published September 30th, 2013