User biometric identification is something that companies such as Apple and Samsung have only started getting involved in, in the past couple of years. You can see their involvement in devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the iPhone 6, which contain pretty reliable fingerprint readers. In fact, said fingerprint readers that are built into these devices are used by many to pay for products online and at retail locations. Now, it looks like a team of researchers over at Yahoo labs have created a working prototype of what could be the next generation of mobile biometric scanning technology.
What these researchers have created (as you can see in the video below) is a technology that utilizes a smartphones capacitive touchscreen to identify the user. It is able to do this when the user presses a body part of choice against the display. In the video you can see people using their ear, fist, palm, and finger tips to have their device identify them using this biometric technology. Bodyprint is able to achieve this by using a special ‘touch chip’ to analyze touch images as opposed to 2D touch locations. While this all sounds nice, there is surely a question that people will be wondering. How reliable is the Bodyprint technology? Well, there is some good news pertaining to reliability as it seems to works just under 100% of the time. In a test conducted by the research team, the Bodyprint technology was able to correctly identify a user 99.8% of the time. This is an astounding success rate and definitely blows both Apple’s and Samsung’s current fingerprint readers out of the water in this respect.
The research team behind Bodyprint knows that their technology has a bright future on mobile devices. But, at the same time they know that there is still a substantial amount of work left to do before the technology becomes mainstream. Once this technology does become incorporated into devices and hit store shelves, it could change the way that users engage with their devices completely. Phone thievery could also plummet due to thieves not being able to access stolen phones, anywhere near as easily as they do now. Check out the video below for a more detailed understanding.