Fujitsu pilots model house that can authenticate anyone, anywhere, all the time

You can add “continuous authentication” to your biometric lexicon, as the Japanese firms Fujitsu and Misawa Homes team up for joint trials of a model house that provides visitors and residents with customized experiences based on biometric data.

According to a company release, sensors installed in shared spaces “identify residents and visitors through cues like their clothing or posture.”

“By continuously identifying people and their movements in the surrounding environment,” says the release, “the technology can help to detect emergency situations including falls and possible injuries of residents or visitors as well as unidentified intruders, to ultimately contribute to the realization of safer housing.”

While the companies say they will explore deployments in high-risk areas such as hospitals and nursing homes, they also have more generalized plans for the system, including cashless payments, personalized office spaces, and bespoke home living.

“The two companies are further conducting trials leveraging this technique to realize personalized living spaces tailored to residents’ personal preferences and needs,” says the release, which includes an illustration of how “continuous authentication through analysis of images from cameras installed at various locations” can be used to call up personalized music, or track visitors throughout the duration of their stay.

To make the system work, Fujitsu’s Actlyzer technology senses and analyzes peoples’ movements and links them with biometric authenticators such as facial recognition or palm vein data. The release explains that “the tracking of a person across multiple cameras remains difficult for conventional technologies because of variations caused by the positioning of cameras. To resolve this challenge, the newly developed technology enables identification of a person from multiple images based on features like clothing and a person’s posture regardless of other variations in lighting, etc.” In other words, the system patches over dead angles by aggregating the two types of identifying data.

“All authentication processes run in the cloud,” says the release, “and results are sent to devices installed in a certain area.”

The joint trial will run until January 1, 2024 in the “Green Infrastructure Model,” an experimental, sustainable model house located at Misawa Park in Tokyo.

Fujitsu, which has been conducting R&D in biometric technology since the 1980s, recently teamed up with several other Japanese companies to create a transactional open virtual world called the Japanese Metaverse Economic Zone.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  continuous authentication  |  facial recognition  |  Fujitsu  |  palm biometrics  |  smart homes