New lab working on security shoe sole to ID people – Yahoo! News

PITTSBURGH AP — High-tech security? Forget those irksome digital eye scans. Meet the biometric shoe.

A new lab is working to perfect special shoe insoles that can help monitor access to high-security areas, like nuclear power plants or special military bases.

The concept is based on research that shows each person has unique feet, and ways of walking. Sensors in the bio-soles check the pressure of feet, monitor gait, and use a microcomputer to compare the patterns to a master file for that person. If the patterns match the bio-soles go to sleep. If they don’t, a wireless alarm message can go out.

“It’s part of a shoe that you don’t have to think about,” said Marios Savvides, head of Carnegie Mellon University’s new Pedo-Biometrics Lab, in Pittsburgh.

The lab, which has $1.5 million in startup funding, is a partnership with Autonomous ID, a Canadian company that is relocating to several U.S. cities. Todd Gray, the company president, said he saw the potential when his daughter was in a maternity ward decorated with representations of different baby feet all along a wall.

Autonomous ID has been working on prototypes since 2009, with the goal of making a relatively low cost ID system. Gray said they’ve already run tests on sample bio-soles, which are no thicker than a common foot pad sold in pharmacies, and achieved an accuracy rate of more than 99 percent. He said Carnegie Mellon will broaden the tests to include “a full spectrum of society: big, tall, thin, heavy, athletic, multicultural, on a diet, twins and so on.”

Gray wouldn’t speculate on what the system will cost or when it might reach the marketplace, but each worker at a site would have his or her own pair of bio-soles.

“Within the third step, it knows it’s you, and it goes back to sleep,” he said. “If I put on yours, it would know almost instantly that I’m not you.”

via New lab working on security shoe sole to ID people – Yahoo! News.

Strange Random Shoe Quote:

“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.” ― Jack Handey

 

 

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