Nymi wristband puts your security only a heartbeat away

As we spend more and more of our daily lives on laptops, tablets and smartphones, the security of these devices is becoming more and more important. Bionym, a tech company based in Toronto, Ontario, is helping us simplify that security, by letting us use something that's always available and unique to each of us — our heartbeat.

Nymi is a simple wristband that stores the unique rate and shape of your heartbeat, by taking an ECG — electrocardiogram. Each day when you put Nymi on, you authenticate yourself by touching a finger to the top of the device, and then you're good until you take it off. As long as you stay authenticated, whenever you use one of your electronic devices, automatically unlocks the device for you. Since the wristband also has motion sensors, you can even use various gestures to send commands to the devices.

As the video shows, Nymi can be used with handheld devices, desktop computers, smart TVs, electronic locks on things like hotel room doors and cars, and it can even be linked to your credit card to make purchases.

The company says that there is some flexibility for Nymi reading your heart rate, so you won't have to wait long after exercising before you can log in, and Karl Martin, the CEO of Bionym, says in an interview with New Scientist that in "practical situations, the false positive rate of the system is effectively zero."

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Since it's impossible to replicate someone's ECG reading, stealing someone's Nymi doesn't help a thief at all. This also apparently thwarts the old (real or fictional) spy tricks of duplicating the particular biometric being used for security — voice recognition with recordings, retinal pattern with contact lenses, fingerprints with the many ingenious methods used, from jelly imprints to fogging up the fingerprint scanner with your breath. You can't even go to more extreme measures, because the person's heart actually needs to be beating to get an authentication.

If you need this kind of security or if you just think it's really cool (count me in amongst the latter), you can pre-order a Nymi for $79 on GetNymi.com.

(Image courtesy: Getty)

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