Susanne Posel
The Nymi bracelet is a stylish heart monitor worn around the wrist. But this new device is capable of so much more . . .
This device is the latest in biometric fashion.
In beta-testing with 1,000 participants, Nymi was shown to be “more accurate than facial recognition, and about as accurate as fingerprint authentication.”
This device can be used with other authentication measures such as bank account passwords and phone numbers to connect with friends and family.
Nymi will monitor the wearer’s individual heart rate and translate that rhythm into a unique and secure ID that can be utilized with Bluetooth headsets.
According to the website: “Like a fingerprint, your heartbeat is unique. The Nymi tells the world, you are you, allowing you to securely communicate your identity to all of your favorite devices.”
Karl Martin, president andco-founder of Bionym, the manufacturer of Nymi, said : “It’s a trusted central point of authentication that you are carrying around.”
Utilizing fingerprint analysis, the wearer can simply touch the device which complete the circuit and uploads personalized settings to the device.
Indeed, the Nymi knows who you are and where you are.
Built in motion sensors and proximity detectors allow the bracelet to let the wearer to create hand-gesture commands to:
• Unlock your car door
• Connect to smart devices
• Make purchases
Using apps downloaded to a smartphone, Nymi can access personal information such as passwords to websites.
Nymi uses the PQRST pattern created by an electrocardiogram (ECG) to see the wearer’s heartbeat.
Just a few months ago, the Motorola Pill, a.k.a. the authentication vitamin, is a stomach acid-powered pill that emits an 18-bit authentication signal that will log the person into an online service.
Regina Duncan, head of special projects for Motorola Mobility and former head of the (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) DARPA, is part of an initiative to bring electronic tattoos that retain passwords to log-in users and the authentication vitamin.
Duncan revealed at the All Things D conference that: “We are thinking of a variety of options for how you could do better at authentication. You can start with near term things like tokens or fobs, but you can also think of a means of authentication that you could wear on your skin for a week at a time. We are talking about an electronic tattoo.”
The electronic tattoo has “sensors and an antenna that can recognize your devices, after which it sends out an authenticating signal.”
Duncan laughed at the idea of teenagers defying their parents by wearing an electronic tattoo. She said: “Teenagers might not want to wear a watch, but you can be sure they’ll wear a tattoo just to piss off their parents.”
Duncan explained: “There are a lot of problems in wearables,” Dugan said, “Electronics are boxy and rigid, humans are curvy and soft. That’s a mechanical mismatch problem. The strategy these companies use for radical innovation is decades out of date. We need to update it. We learned to do it at DARPA and we’re going to bring it to mobile, and it will have cascading effect on industry.”
MC10 is working with Motorola to perfect the electronic tattoos. In essence, the pill turns the user’s entire body into a password.
Duncan explained how the authentication pill is actually a tiny computer ship. She said: “It also has what amounts to an inside-out potato battery. The acids in your stomach serve as an electrolyte and power it up.”
Last November, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in New Jersey has signed a 5 year contract with Radiant RFID to provide emergency tracking devices in the “event of a hurricane, natural disaster or other incident to assist in reunification of families.”
Under Radiant’s Emergency Management Solution (EMS) technology, these RFID chips will track movements of people, pets and assets “without repeatedly stopping people to take their name or scan a bar code. The seamless tracking helps eliminate lines, reduce redundancy and keep families together in times of emergency.”
EMS technology is specifically designed to keep “families united throughout an evacuation process; whether it is children and parents or families and pets.”
Pennsylvania schools are tracking 450 students with RFID devices around their necks during a study conducted by the University of Pittsburgh program called Social Mixing and Reparatory Transmission in Schools (SMART).
Students in selected school districts will be monitored via RFID chips to see how many people each individual child comes into contact with to determine how a pandemic could be transmitted.
Their social activities, conversations, proximity to others and shared items will be tracked as well.
SMART is being conducted with a $700,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
This study endeavors to decipher:
• Effective ways of keeping a flu from spreading
• Should student movement be restricted during class
• Vaccine intervention
• Should sick children be sequestered
Scientists at the Tel Aviv University and Women’s Hospital have combined forces to create a pill-sized robot that can be powered remotely by an MRI machine. This robot will swim through the patient’s gut and identify any warning signs of gastrointestinal cancer.
Susanne Posel’s Website is Occupy Corporatism
