Wearable device user authentication using physiological and behavioral metrics

Abstract

Wearables, such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, and Microsoft Band, with their rich collection of sensors, facilitate the tracking of healthcare- and wellness-related metrics. However, the assessment of the physiological metrics collected by these devices could also be useful in identifying the user of the wearable, e.g., to detect unauthorized use or to correctly associate the data to a user if wearables are shared among multiple users. Further, researchers and healthcare providers often rely on these smart wearables to monitor research subjects and patients in their natural environments over extended periods of time. Here, it is important to associate the sensed data with the corresponding user and to detect if a device is being used by an unauthorized individual, to ensure study compliance. Existing one-time authentication approaches using credentials (e.g., passwords, certificates) or trait-based biometrics (e.g., face, fingerprints, iris, voice) might fail, since such credentials can easily be shared among users. In this paper, we present a continuous and reliable wearable-user authentication mechanism using coarse-grain minute-level physical activity (step counts) and physiological data (heart rate, calorie burn, and metabolic equivalent of task). From our analysis of 421 Fitbit users from a two-year long health study, we are able to statistically distinguish nearly 100% of the subject-pairs and to identify subjects with an average accuracy of 92.97%.