‘ECG safer than biometrics for human identification, comes with zero forgery’

LUCKNOW: The electrocardiogram (ECG), used to check heart’s rhythm and electrical activity, can be used more effectively for human identification and is safer than biometrics as it comes with the advantage of zero forgery. With the use of advanced machine learning techniques and detailed comparison of human heartbeats worldwide,

ECG

resemblance can never be falsified and hence has a high potential for identification, revealed a research conducted by the faculty and research scholars of the computer science and engineering department of the IET, Lucknow. The research published in ‘Pattern Recognition’ — an academic journal published by

Elsevier Science

— was conducted by

Prof YN

Singh and his research scholars

Ranjeet Srivastava

and Ashutosh Singh.

“Security is a prime concern of the modern society as incidents of identity theft in the digital world are growing. Traditional security systems that use electronic identification using tokens or passwords are not much reliable as they can only identify the supplied information, not the user,” said Prof Singh.

There have been numerous cases where biometrics failed, for example, fake fingerprints created with a 3D printer bypass biometric scanners to unlock smartphones, laptops, and other devices under certain circumstances, hence using the ECG is safest as it has been proven by our research that two heartbeats cannot be same, he added.

“We performed the ECG analysis using signal processing and machine learning techniques and proved statistically that there is no chance of ECG resemblance in the whole world population of 7.9 billion,” he said. Singh said that an electrocardiogram (ECG) is a physiological signal that records the electrical activity of the heart over time.

It is a non-invasive method to monitor heart function and diagnose cardiac arrhythmia (a condition in which the heart beats with irregular or abnormal rhythm). “Our research has revealed that ECG can be used as a biometric modality for human recognition. ECG has an inherent feature of vitality that signifies the life signs and its signal as a biometric is sufficiently non-vulnerable to spoof attacks, so it ensures robustness against fraud,” Prof Singh said.

In India, traditional ECG machines with about seven leads that are put on the chest are used but new ones have just two leads that are put on one finger of both hands. IET has also proposed to make a wireless ECG device for biometric use, he added.

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