Activity-based electrocardiogram biometric verification using wearable devices

Abstract

Activity classification and biometric authentication have become synonymous with wearable technologies such as smartwatches and trackers. Although great efforts have been made to develop electrocardiogram (ECG)-based biometric verification and identification modalities using data from these devices, in this paper, we explore the use of adaptive techniques based on prior activity classification in an attempt to enhance biometric performance. In doing so, we also compare two waveform similarity distances to provide features for classification. Two public datasets which were collected from medical and wearable devices provide a cross-device comparison. Our results show that our method is able to be used for both wearable and medical devices in activity classification and biometric verification cases. This study is the first study which uses only ECG signals for both activity classification and biometric verification purposes.