In the early days of the iPhone, many users found themselves enamored by the device’s capacitive touchscreen. The naked human finger usurped the stylus and mouse cursor and claimed dominance as the one true input device for all our mobile computing needs. We began to use our fingers to tap, scroll, swipe, pinch, and zoom. The capacitive touchscreen became a commodity that’s pretty much a standard feature of all modern smartphones.
Mobile developers would come up with all sorts of applications for our fingers to play with, from virtual pianos to digital canvases. One peculiar little phenomenon during those early app store days was the “fingerprint scanner” app. You’d download the app, press your finger to the screen, and the app would pretend to scan and analyze it, as if you were giving out your biometric data to unlock some confidential files on your phone. Unfortunately, it was all make-believe. Most phones at the time were actually incapable of doing this, as there were no built-in biometric security measures on your mobile devices back then. It was all just pretend.
Of course, Apple would eventually implement TouchID several years later on the iPhone 5S and newer. Unfortunately, if you were stuck with an older model iPhone, you’d never get a bite of that super fancy biometric security pie. However, thanks to researchers at Yahoo Labs, legacy mobile users may just get a taste of that pie after all, as long as they have a functioning touchscreen.
At the 2015 Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference in Seoul, Korea, Yahoo researchers demoed their “Bodyprint” technology, which uses a capacitive touchscreen to record an analyze body parts for authenticating identity
Bodyprint won’t be scanning your fingerprints, though. Capacitive displays have a lower input resolution than traditional fingerprint scanners, but since the surface area of a mobile display is much larger, it will be able to read and authenticate larger body parts, such as an ear or a fist. It can even scan your palm or a set of fingers as your grip your phone.
In a standard use case, imagine that instead of having to type in a PIN number or place your finger on the TouchID sensor of your iPhone, you can place you palm on the screen to authenticate and unlock the device. Another example would be to use ear authentication for answering phone calls. When someone other than you picks up your phone to answer a call, Bodyprint will scan their ear as they place the phone up to their head and lock them out from answering the call once it identifies that the ear does not belong to you.
While fingerprint scanners and other biometric technology are exclusive to newer, higher-end phones, all modern smartphones feature a capacitive touchscreen, and therefore potential access to the Bodyprint authentication process. It’s a really an ingenious use of older, commoditized technology.
You can view a video demonstration of Yahoo Labs’ Bodyprint in action here.
By Alfredo Dizon, eParisExtra 