Heartbeat biometrics: a sensing system perspective

This paper reviews the emerging research into exploitation of heartbeat data as a biometric for human identification. A variety of methods have been proposed for acquiring heartbeat signatures and a range of processing methods has been examined. We approach the biometric identification and verification problem by characterising the three major factors affecting performance: individual variants, environmental variants, and sensor variants. The ability to collect and process the signal, exploit the data for individual identification or verification, and disseminate the information depends on all three of these factors. Within each component, we have identified the relevant research. Where possible, we have tied these research papers to practical examples using high resolution ECG data. The research indicates that the heartbeat contains rich information about the individual, their level of anxiety, and the cardiac state.