With Nymi Wristband, Your Heartbeat Unlocks Your Devices

 

 

 

 

Here's a twist on knowing thy heart. A startup is looking to manufacture a wristband that recognizes its wearer by his or her heartbeat. The wristband, called Nymi, then communicates with wearers' other devices—laptops, tablets, smartphones—to unlock them when their owners pick them up.

The wristband isn't ready for sale yet. Its creators, part of a small Toronto-based company called Bionym, are now taking pre-orders for $79. Bionym plans to ship Nymis in 2014. Once ready, the wristband will come with the ability to unlock PCs, Macs, and iPhone and Android phones and tablets, Karl Martin, Bionym's CEO, tells Popular Science.
It's not clear yet exactly how accurate Nymi (Martin pronounced it "NIM-mi") will be, nor how convenient it will be to use. But it is a very cool combination of technologies: It not only IDs who's wearing it by his or heartbeat, it also recognizes gestures and its distance from different electronic devices.
Here's how it works. When wearers put the Nymi on, sensors in the wristband will take the person's ECG. That's the measurement that hospitals take when they measure people's heartbeats. Although all healthy hearts make roughly the same spiky shapes in an ECG sensor, there are enough differences in the graph to tell different people apart, several years of research has found.

Karl Martin Displays a Nymi Model over Skype

The Nymi takes its wearers' heartbeat just once, when they put the wristband on. Then, as long as they wear the wristband, the Nymi is able to communicate with and unlock any devices with which it's registered. If people take their Nymi off, it won't work anymore until it takes another ECG measurement. That prevents others from being able to use a lost or stolen Nymi.
In the future, Martin and his colleagues are hoping other app developers will make programs that will let Nymi do more than what Bionym will build in. A video* Bionym produced shows some possibilities. Unlocking a car door with a gesture, unlocking a hotel room door, turning on the TV to the wearer's last-watched program—those are all things Nymi will be prepared to do, given the right app.