Your Body’s Bioacoustic Signatures Could Be Used to Identify You

The ability to digitally recognize you as an individual is very useful. From a security standpoint, biometric authentication is potentially more robust than traditional login methods like passwords. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, your biometric data can be used by corporations or the government to track you. Common biometric identification technology today includes fingerprint readers, iris scanning, and facial recognition. A team of researchers from South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) have recently released a study describing a new method of identifying people by using their bodies’ bioacoustic signatures.

Like other biometric identifiers, your body’s bioacoustic signatures can be used to recognize you as an individual. When sound waves pass through your body, they are modified by your unique combination of tissue, bone, blood vessels, and body chemistry. While all humans have very similar anatomy, individuals are unique enough to affect sound waves in slightly different ways. That is true for every part of your body, which means that sound waves can be projected through any part of your body that is convenient for identification. As long as your unique bioacoustic signatures have already be registered, they can be used later to recognize you.

To test this, the research team used a transducer to send sound waves through the fingers of test subjects. The sound waves emerging from their fingers were then analyzed. They found that individuals could be identified with 97 percent accuracy, and they could even differentiate between which fingers were used. There were concerns that changing body composition could make people unrecognizable, but in testing the results remained consistent over months. They also found an additional benefit of this technology: it can be used to analyze tissues in order to potentially diagnose musculoskeletal diseases non-invasively.