B-Secur updates heartbeat biometric software to improve accuracy of ECG
B-Secur announced an update to its HeartKey cardiac monitoring software to enhance the effectiveness of its biometric medical capabilities and applications.
The company describes the HeartKey 2.0 as a cloud-based software that reduces electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) signal noise to refine data and give clinicians more accurate information during the diagnosis phase. It also says it will raise medical and financial efficiency by minimizing false positive matches and the need for additional testing.
With the intent to facilitate a greater trend towards medical wearables, including consumer electronics, B-Secur says HeartKey 2.0 is available for Holter monitors, wearables, and implantable devices. The software received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 2021.
B-Secur says HeartKey 2.0 is timely, due to COVID-19’s impact on the heart leading to irreparable cardiac damage and arrhythmias, which places greater emphasis on heart health and remote monitoring through IoT medical devices. It is a sentiment echoed by Ben Carter, B-Secur’s chief commercial officer, in an interview with Biometric Update, who said the pandemic shifted its focus to health-related heart biometrics software and wearables.
Carter said the company is looking to resume its biometric authentication plans while it seeks to raise more Series B and Series C funding.
ECG biometric cannot be forged: study
Research from The Institute of Engineering and Technology, Lucknow, suggests that ECG identification may be the strongest biometric available because it cannot be forged or spoofed.
The research, published in the Pattern Recognition journal, performed ECG analysis using signal processing and machine learning techniques to discover that there is statistically “no chance of ECG resemblance in the whole world population of 7.9 billion,” according to professor YN Singh, who led the study.
Singh refers to problems with tokens and passwords as security vulnerabilities, and cases where fingerprint biometrics are fooled by spoofs. He says the research shows that ECG can be a biometric modality that also features an inherent sign of life that robustly protects it against spoofing.
The results of the paper are similar to a study from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, that found a person’s heartbeat can be used as a highly accurate biometric to identify individuals.
Article Topics
B-Secur | biometric identifiers | biometrics | ECG | healthcare | heartbeat biometrics | research and development | wearables
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As a developer of ECG-based biometrics, I can tell you that under certain circumstances, with extremely difficult conditions to meet, ECG can be somewhat spoofed depending on the way the biometric is trained.