Electrical Impedance of Upper Limb Enables Robust Wearable Identity Recognition against Variation in Finger Placement and Environmental Factors

Most biometric authentication technologies commercialized in various fields mainly rely on acquired images of structural information, such as fingerprints, irises, and faces. However, bio-recognition techniques using these existing physical features are always at risk of template forgery threats, such as fake fingerprints. Due to the risk of theft and duplication, studies have recently been attempted using the internal structure and biological characteristics of the human body, including our previous works on the ratiometric biological impedance feature. However, one may still question its accuracy in real-life use due to the artifacts from sensing position variability and electrode–skin interfacing noise. Moreover, since the finger possesses more severe thermoregulatory vasomotion and large variability in the tissue properties than the core of the body, it is necessary to mitigate the harsh changes occurring at the peripheral extremities of the human body. To address these challenges, we propose a biometric authentication method through robust feature extraction from the upper-limb impedance acquired based on a portable wearable device. In this work, we show that the upper limb impedance features obtained from wearable devices are robust against undesirable factors such as finger placement deviations and day-to-day physiological changes, along with ratiometric impedance features. Overall, our upper-limb impedance-based analysis in a dataset of 1627 measurement from 33 subjects lowered the classification error rate from 22.38% to 4.3% (by a factor of 5), and further down to 2.4% (by a factor of 9) when combined with the ratiometric features.