Tag: Biometrics

Apple Acquires Sleep-Tracking Firm Beddit To Dive Deeper Into Sleep Tech

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Apple has acquired a Finnish sleep tech company called Beddit, which makes a sleep monitoring device which tracks heart rate, breathing, and sleep cycles. Users can download its iOS app for further analysis of their sleep data. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but it certainly indicates Apple’s ambition in expanding its sleep-related products and software features.  

What Brands Need To Do
As we witnessed at this year’s CES, sleep tech is booming and quickly becoming a key growth area for many tech, lifestyle, and fitness companies. Now with Apple jumping into the ring, we expect to see more innovations pop up in the sleep tech sector. This emerging trend opens up a new product category for brands to explore. Integrating biometric data into your brand’s existing digital ecosystem will bring a better understanding of your customers and their habits, allowing brands to offer a holistic lifestyle product with added value to customers.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Mastercard Starts Testing Credit Cards With Fingerprint Sensors In South Africa

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Mastercard is testing a new kind of payment cards integrated with fingerprint sensors for authentication. Instead of putting in your PIN or hastily signing the receipts to complete purchases, you simply press your thumb on the card to prove the transaction. Mastercard is currently testing this new biometric card in South Africa, and plans to roll it out worldwide later this year. Users will need to go to an enrollment center (usually a bank) to have their fingerprints taken in order to use this type of cards.

One thing to note is that this type of biometric authentication only works with the new chip-and-pin cards, which has been gaining momentum in the U.S. thanks to regulatory changes in the past two years that pushed merchants and banks to upgrade from the magnetic stripe cards and swipe-only POS terminals.

What Brands Need To Do
Mastercard has been exploring the integration of biometric technology in payment authentication for a while now. Previously, the credit card company also tested a mobile payment method that is authenticated by taking a selfie. Other brands, especially those in retail and financial services, should take notes and start thinking about how to upgrade their security and authentication process by using new biometric technologies to provide a smoother user experience.  

 

Source: Engadget

 

How Infiniti Visualized Customer Response To Its New Cars

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Japanese auto brand Infiniti wanted to show people how exciting their new models are, so it leveraged biometric tracking for an innovative event activation at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance auto show last week. Visitors to the Infiniti Pavilion received an armband that tracked their physiological reactions like muscle cell electrical activity toward the new cars on exhibition. Also, the armbands were connected to various sensors installed in the cars and throughout the Infiniti Pavilion to map out how long attendees checked out the new models. The data was then graphed and projected on a giant LED display to showcase the enthusiasm of potential buyers.

What Brands Need To Do
This use case of biometric data showcases an interesting way for brands to incorporate wearables into event activations. It offers a cool way to visualize the enthusiasm of event goers, attract and entertain onlookers, and collect data about what potential buyers are most interested in. Other brands seeking ways to infuse their events with a little digital fun should take a cue from Infiniti and explore what wearable tech can add to brand activations.

 

Source: Digiday

 

Gatorade To Suggest Drinks By Analyzing Your Sweat

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Sports drink maker Gatorade is pushing into digital fitness with a smart-cap bottle and a chip-embedded sweat patch. The smart-cap bottle can monitor fluid intake and share real-time hydration data with the Gatorade app, and the sweat patch can work with an app to analyze sweat and identify a user’s sweat level, as well as their electrolyte and additional fluid-intake needs. Combining these real-time data, Gatorade can inform users when and how much they should drink during workouts and recommend one of its twelve drink formulas that fits their sweat type.

What Brands Need To Do
As Gatorade taps into biometric data and adds extra value to its products, it provides a great example for brands looking to use customer data to optimize their products and services. As more consumers embrace fitness wearables, it is important for fitness, healthcare, and lifestyle brands to keep up with shifting consumer behavior and find a way to integrate all the fitness data available into their products and services.

 

Source: Digiday

You Can Soon Authenticate A MasterCard Payment With A Selfie

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
MasterCard is bringing new security measures to digital payment, as part of its push towards cardless payment. The credit card company has confirmed its plan to roll out a new “Selfie Pay” feature to its mobile app this year, which will allow users to authenticate their payments by taking a selfie. The company says this facial recognition system will only be used in certain contexts when extra authentication is needed. Moreover, MasterCard revealed that it is also working on heartbeat-based authentication, which uses sensors to read a person’s electrocardiogram, the unique electrical signal produced by their heart, to identify users and confirm payments passively and more quickly than with a selfie.

What Brands Need To Do
MasterCard’s foray into biometric-based authentication is illustrative of the way mobile and wearable technologies are transforming the ways people pay. As the security measures for mobile payments continue to evolve and improve, brands need to start incorporating existing reward and loyalty programs into mobile payment solutions in order to offer customers a frictionless shopping experience.

 

Sources: The Verge

Hands-Free Tinder Lets Your Heart (Rate) Do The Swiping

Posted on by Lab Team

At the beginning of this year, we explored in our 2015 Outlook the concept of “Measurable Intimacy” – the idea that mobile devices, powered by the myriad of sensors embedded within, are making user engagement and their emotional responses increasingly measurable. Now, a new Apple Watch app for Tinder taps into the heart rate sensor on the Watch to create a new user experience of the popular mobile dating app.

Developed by U.S. innovation agency T3, the Hands-Free Tinder app monitors Tinder users’ heart rate while they look through pictures of potential matches. Using a baseline measurement, it will swipe right if the pulse goes up by at least 10% and swipe left if there’s minimal change after about 6 seconds of measuring. An ingenious usage of the sensors on wearables, this app finds a fun, innovative way to incorporate biometric data into real-time user experience, truly unleashing the potential of Measureable Intimacy.

 

Source: Hands-Free Tinder by T3; Header image screen captured from source video.

 

Apple Watch May Help Make Playlists Based On Your Pulse

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: PSFK

Apple Watch comes with a lot of sensors to measure your biometric data such as heartbeat rates, movements, or calorie burns, primarily for health and fitness purposes. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be used outside the healthcare domain.

HeartbeatsMUSIC came up with an app concept for Beats Music that leverages the pulse-detecting function on Apple Watch into contextual music discovery. The app could capture the changes in a user’s pulse and activates the mic embedded in the Apple Watch in order to identify the songs, before automatically organizing them into different playlists based on both heartbeat rates and the music beats. If ever made a reality, this could inspire more interesting new use cases of biometric sensors on smartwatches.