Using ECG as a measure in biometric identification systems

Over the last few years, there has been a number of publications suggesting the use of Electrocardiogram (ECG) as a biometric measure. Motivated by the level of sustainability to attacks the ECG provides, it can be combined in a multi-modal biometric identification system or, when the permanence and collectability issues are not an issue and the false positive margin problem is controlled and not critical, used alone for authentication of subjects. Its primary application can be in health care systems where the ECG is used for health measurements. It does furthermore, better than any other biometrics measures, deliver the proof of subject´s being alive as extra information which other biometrics cannot deliver as easily. Nevertheless, the proposed feature extraction methods and experiments have not been published with a corresponding theoretical analysis of the maximum possibility of collision in an infinite domain of subjects and thus, as its current status it is best suited for complementing other metrics for a higher level of accuracy and proof of liveliness.