Haptic-Based Biometrics: A Feasibility Study

Biometric systems identify users based on behavioral or physiological characteristics. The advantages of such systems over traditional authentication methods such as passwords are well known and hence biometric systems are gradually gaining ground in terms of usage. This paper explores the feasibility of automatically and continuously identifying participants in Haptic systems. Such a biometric system could be used for authentication in any Haptic based application, such as tele-operation or tele-training, not only at the beginning of the session, but continuously and throughout the session as it progresses. In order to test this possibility, we designed a Haptic system in which position, velocity, force and torque data from the tool was continuously measured and stored as users were performing a specific task. Subsequently, several algorithms and methods were developed to extract biometric features from the measured data. Overall, the results suggest reasonable practicality of implementing haptic-based biometric systems, and that it is an avenue worth pursuing; although they also indicate that it might be quite difficult to develop a highly accurate Haptic ID algorithm.