Tattoos To Replace Passwords On Motorola Phones

An interesting article was posted this morning on The Drum Motorola’s newest ‘solution’ to irritating mobile phone authentication. The brand is known on a worldwide scale and carries a massive range of successful product lines, from broadband modems to baby monitors, mobile phones and fitness technology. Their latest idea however is something we’re not entirely sure about and has the potential to raise some controversy.

The newest concept comes in the form of a ‘Biostamp’; a ‘tattoo’ which contains flexible electronic circuits and is attached to the user’s skin using a rubber stamp. The initiative behind this is that the Biostamp, designed by Massachusetts-based firm MC10, will eradicate the process of entering passwords to unlock a mobile device; making logging into sites and accessing mobile phones easier and more secure. Rather than entering a password to gain access to the mobile phone, it would simply be unlocked by holding the device close to the user’s body.  The temporary tattoo is made from silicon and contains electrical circuits that bend and move with the wearer’s body. It can be worn for two weeks under the protection of spray-on bandages; Motorola believes this makes it perfect for authentication purposes.

As if this wasn’t enough, Motorola claims that the circuits could even be adapted and incorporated into a swallowable pill, containing a computer chip that can be powered like a battery using stomach acid. Once swallowed, the ‘vitamin authentication pill’ creates a signal inside the body which can be picked up by mobile devices to verify that the wearer or in this case the ‘swallower’ is the correct owner of the device.

Regina Dugan, former head of the US Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, modelled the Biostamp at the D11 conference in California, claiming ‘authentication is irritating. In fact it is so irritating that only about half the people do it’. However at apt we’re not sure that this is the best solution to irritating authentication.

Truthfully, we’re not sure how the Biostamp would even work if the phone was in your handbag or pocket. Surely the two would still be within range of each other, so in this case how would you ever keep your phone locked? If the concept behind the Biostamp is to increase security of a mobile device, we’re not sure this would be an effective solution.

We feel one of the main initiatives behind this design is that it could potentially be quite cheap to research, trial and manufacture in comparison to how much it might cost to design and create new in-built technologies for authentication. In our opinion the facial recognition features of the Samsung Galaxy S3 are preferable, or perhaps the introduction fingertip recognition might be a better option, but we think people will be reluctant to use a temporary tattoo attached to their skin over fortnightly periods for the sole reason of unlocking a mobile phone (something that actually isn’t that much of a chore).