Smart Phones that Know Their Users by How They Wal

mirgens writes: Technology review has a short article on new work on doing gait analysis with the accelerometers built into many smart phones. The work was done at the Norwegian Information Security Laboratory ("Nislab"). The need for more security on mobile devices is increasing with new functionalities and features made available. To improve the device security Nislab proposed gait recognition as a protection mechanism — in other words, if somebody else walks away with your phone, it locks up. While previous work on gait recognition used video sources, for instance to identify people in airports or secure buildings, the Nislab researchers collected the gait data using a Google G1 phone containing the AK8976A embedded accelerometer.