Haptics for Recognizing and Quantifying Hand Movement Patterns for Authentication

Haptics is the discipline that deals with the study of the complex sense of touch as an interface between human beings and machines. Haptic technology has been proven applicable and practical in many fields, including scientific visualization, medical training, authentication and other areas such as education and arts. This research investigates the usage of haptics as a mechanism to extract users´ behaviors and to build a biometric system for authentication. We captured human behavior while users were interacting with two haptic devices: the Desktop PHANToM device (single-point interaction) and the CyberForce system (hand exoskeleton device). Experimental results, based on a set of haptic-based applications, show that single-point interaction haptic devices are suitable for authentication purposes. On the other hand, multiple-point haptic devices --hand exoskeleton devices-still seem to be far from being used in a haptic-biometric system. When using hand exoskeleton devices, the extracted features are not a good source of rich information to characterize a biometric identifier system.