Computer scientists have proposed a wearable healthcare device that uses unique physiological signatures in a patient’s heart rate or other physiological response to prevent tampering by malicious hackers. A research paper presented on Monday at the 3rd Usenix Workshop of Health Security and Privacy describes a health sensor that measures the unique electrical properties of a patient’s body to recognize their identity. A separate paper recently penned by many of the same scientists envisions a similar device that uses heart rates, galvanic skin response, or other physiological data as a shared secret that can be used to securely share encryption keys among sensor nodes attached to the same body.
