Abstract
Biometric systems designed on wearable technology have substantial differences from traditional biometric systems. Due to their wearable nature, they generally capture noisier signals and can only be trained with signals belonging to the device user (biometric verification). In this article, we assess the feasibility of using low-cost wearable sensors—photoplethysmogram (PPG), electrocardiogram (ECG), accelerometer (ACC), and galvanic skin response (GSR)—for biometric verification. We present a prototype, built with low-cost wearable sensors, that was used to capture data from 25 subjects while seated (at resting state), walking, and seated (after a gentle stroll). We used this data to evaluate how the different combinations of signals affected the biometric verification process. Our results showed that the low-cost sensors currently being embedded in many fitness bands and smart-watches can be combined to enable biometric verification. We report and compare the results obtained by all tested configurations. Our best configuration, which uses ECG, PPG and GSR, obtained 0.99 area under the curve and 0.02 equal error rate with only 60 s of training data. We have made our dataset public so that our work can be compared with proposals developed by other researchers.
Highlights
Authentication systems verify the identity of a machine or person to provide access to different services
We evaluated the different combinations of ECG, PPG, and galvanic skin response (GSR) for their usage in biometric verification systems; and (1b) We used data from the second activity, evaluating ACC, PPG, and GSR
We first analysed the equal error rate (EER) obtained by the different variations of the feature options, training, and window sizes (for the sake of completeness, the area under the curve (AUC) results for the three scenarios are summarized in Appendix A)
Summary
Authentication systems verify the identity of a machine or person to provide access to different services (banking, email, etc.). An authentication system uses one or multiple factors, which can be categorised as “something you know” (i.e., passwords), “something you have”. (i.e., security tokens), or “something you are” (i.e., biometrics). This is known as the authentication triad. Personal identification numbers (PINs) and passwords are routinely used to access computer systems, electronic locks, and all types of on-line accounts. They are probably the most widely used authentication factor, choosing good passwords is not a simple task [1], generally leading to weak choices, increasing the risk of compromise [2]. USB tokens and other hardware keys are gaining a broader adoption as a second-factor authentication method for greater security [3]
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