Phones will soon tell by way a user walks if it's fine to talk

MOBILE phones will soon be able to recognise their owners by the way they walk, say scientists who unveiled a security sensor which responds to a person's movements.

The technology, developed by Finnish researchers, would disable equipment if it sensed the person using it was not the owner, helping to cut crime by preventing unauthorised use of portable devices such as laptops and mobile phones.

The inventors say the system could also be adapted for credit cards in the future so it could verify a user's identity based on their physical movements before approval of payment transactions.

Heikki Ailisto, a professor at VTT, the Technical Research Centre of Finland, said the principal advantage was that it provided an effective identification method but did not require the user to perform a specific task like entering a password.

"It is better in the sense it is unobtrusive and implicit - people are lazy about using passwords, fingerprint sensors, anything which requires explicit action."

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