Abstract
Abstract Anthropometrics show that the lengths of many human body segments follow a common proportional relationship. To know the length of one body segment – such as a thumb – potentially provides a predictive route to other physical characteristics, such as overall standing height. In this study, we examined whether it is feasible that the length of a person׳s thumb could be revealed from the way in which they complete swipe gestures on a touchscreen-based smartphone. From a corpus of approx. 19,000 swipe gestures captured from 178 volunteers, we found that people with longer thumbs complete swipe gestures with shorter completion times, higher speeds and with higher accelerations than people with shorter thumbs. These differences were also observed to exist between our male and female volunteers, along with additional differences in the amount of touch pressure applied to the screen. Results are discussed in terms of linking behavioural and physical biometrics.
Highlights
The ability to accurately link a physical person to their activities conducted in the digital realm is an increasing challenge for our intelligence and law enforcement agencies
We present an initial investigation of the relationship between six touchscreen swipe gesture characteristics and a specific physical characteristic of their creator: the length of their thumb
From an analysis of approximately 19,000 swipe gestures supplied by 178 participants, we show that there is a relationship between thumb length and three features of swipe gestures
Summary
The ability to accurately link a physical person to their activities conducted in the digital realm is an increasing challenge for our intelligence and law enforcement agencies. We present initial findings from an exploration into whether it is feasible to infer a single specific physical characteristic of a person – the length of their thumb – from the way in which they perform a common smartphone interaction gesture, the ‘swipe’. If such a link could be made, we suggest that by following a route through known proportional relationships between that digit length and other human measurements, we would conceivably be able to infer various other physical characteristics of the person who created
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