In Search of the Next Biometric

May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Stephanie Silk

Getting into buildings and accessing documents is not as simple as it used to be. Now, thanks to biometrics, it's your fingerprint or the iris of your eye that grants you access to secure domains. But as biometric technology progresses, there's always a search for the “next biometric.”

The importance of biometrics in the security-bound world we have today is undeniable, says Walter Hamilton, chairman of the International Biometric Industry Association, Washington, D.C. And though he admits that biometric technology is developing at a rapid rate, he is still a little wary of some of the new ideas. “Some of the more novel biometrics include walking gait, shape of a person's ear and even human body odor, which is supposed to exhibit some unique properties that can be measured. Universities and government agencies are constantly considering new biometric technologies to help in the war on terror or in other commercial applications,” Hamilton says.

One company says it is making great strides with a behavioral access product — a shoe that monitors a user's gait. Plantiga Technologies Inc., Vancouver, is developing a new security platform using footwear that will generate continuing biometric data. The difference the shoe makes for biometrics is that the data acquired is always dynamic — not static, such as a handprint.

Plantiga's business director, Quin Sandler, says that his company is not the first to try marketing shoes as a biometric product. Previous experiments include a sensor that is placed into the user's shoe. But Plantiga's vision is a pair of shoes the user must first buy, along with software, and from there, all movements are monitored using Adaptive FIT technology. The technology starts with the shoe identifying the relationship between an individual's foot and the ground. The foot side mirrors, and the ground side interprets. The shoe will then unscramble the foot's movements and mark continuous rearrangement of the bones, all within the shoe's architecture. It then leads the information into the digital extension of the analog technology, thus giving the user a report on his unique actions.

With this new identity management system, a person can go through his or her normal workday and the biometric work is done for them just from wearing the shoes. On top of providing a way out of using biometrics, the shoes also secure something else — the user's confidence. Sandler says it is fear of “clone-ability” and stealing that prevents companies from implementing biometrics. But he says that since Plantiga's shoe is always generating data, the option for identity theft decreases.

It also may save time and money. Companies can just buy their employees pairs of shoes instead of buying an eye scanner for each door, voice recognition for each phone or fingerprint recognition for each document. “We are trying to make convergence between physical and logical access control. The shoes work for doors, computers, documents and phones. No biometric out there can account for access in every area.,” Sandler says.

Another feature of the Plantiga footwear is that the information sent from the shoe can be sent straight to a cell phone. “You need any outlet that has a chip or something comparable. It's better for us to build software that you can input into any cell phone, not another device. It will be a basic representative of a handheld for our software,” Sandler says.

A day in the life

Sandler gives an idea of a possible day an airport employee might have. “You would start by walking up to the access control panel to get into the tarmac area, walk to your office and sit down at your desk to look at baggage claim reports. The computer registers that you are in front of it so that every document will open. Then it can register that you get up and leave. You can go through the facilities at the airport, and all the elevators and doors will make a record that you were there.”

Hamilton is skeptical. “A non-living object like a shoe would not seem to meet the widely accepted definition of a biometric. Misidentifications could be costly or threaten our security.”

Whether it be a shoe, a gesture or even the way one's breath smells, access control is just getting more individualistic with each passing year.

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