Using Your Heartbeat as a Password

What’s the Latest Development?

Taiwanese scientists are working to determine the rhythmic pattern that underlies your heartbeat, which is unique to your body and never repeats itself. Using the mathematics of chaos theory along with an electrocardiograph (ECG), Chun-Liang Lin at the National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, is trying to extract the unique mathematical features underlying your heart’s pattern. The ECG is currently used to take a pulse reading from each palm, then Lin’s algorithms creates a pass key based on the pattern of beats. 

What’s the Big Idea?

The goal of Lin’s research is to build the heartbeat pattern recognition system into external hard drives, and other devices, which require a unique pass key to enter. Using biometric data like a heartbeat’s pattern, or the unique formation of the eye’s iris would, in principle, require that the user be present to unlock the data library in question. Our current custom, which requires recording and remembering an individual password for each different website we need to access will surely prove a primitive method of guarding electronic data.

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