Biometrics ("Bio"=body & "Metrics"=measure) takes advantage of many things that make you a unique person. We've all heard that our fingerprints are our own, nobody in the whole world has the same set of swirls and dips that make our fingers look so funny. But that's not all, there are other areas on your body that give you your own personal signature!

     Besides your fingers, everyone's eyes are different. Not in just color, but in the tiny variations in your irises. If you get a good friend to sit still for a minute, look into their eyes and you can see that the colored part has tiny streaks going outward. It's these streaks that can be read by a computer to find out who you are. More than just your eyes, your entire face can give you away! Everybody's face gives off heat in different amounts and in different areas of the face. These heat patterns, called Thermal Images, can be read by a machine to match you up with your identity. Moving back to your fingers, some companies don't want to leave it at just that, they've discovered that the whole palm of your hand is just as unique as your fingerprints, and there are machines that can read that!

How does it work?

     To see these features on your body, different machines, called Biometric Readers, are used to input whatever information is needed. For your eyes, an optical retina scanner would scan your eye with a laser (before you say OUCH, it's harmless and doesn't hurt) and convert the reflection into a stream of data that could then be compared to information stored in a database. If the data from your eye matches data in the database, then hooray! You're authorized to do whatever it is that you wanted to do.

     Optical palm scanners get their information in pretty much the same way, by having you press your palm onto a piece of glass. A laser scans your palm much in the same way as a regular paper scanner does, then that data is compared with a database to see who you are.

     Thermal imaging devices read the temperature differences in your face and, you guessed it, compare that with data in a database. What makes a thermal scanner pretty cool is that it can read your face at hundreds of feet away!

     What does all of this have to do with your money? In the not-too-distant future, you won't need your checkbook, bankcard or even your pin number to access your account, get money or buy something at the store. Just like in the movie "Sneakers", you might simply be able to say "My voice is my passport" and Bam, you've got the $20 you wanted!

Did You Know?

Different types of biometrics have been used even at the SuperBowl, to make sure that known criminals weren't in the crowd!