You pick up your smartphone. After a few paces it can identify you, use that data to unlock your phone, and tap into the energy you create by moving to recharge its battery.
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Tech that harnesses the power of our bodies may mean passwords, fingerprint authentication and poor battery life may soon be a thing of the past.
CSIRO Data61 scientists have created prototype technology which analyses how a person walks and captures their unique energy generation pattern to use as a form of authentication.
Lead researcher Sara Khalifa said the technology was a big leap forward and had the potential to be used in future digital authentication to unlock a car, a bank terminal or even to verify passport holder identity.
Gait-recognition technology has been limited by the battery power needed to use small sensors to measure motion and velocity.
The new invention overcomes this by focusing on a technique called kinetic energy harvesting (KEH), which translates a person's motion into electrical energy and improves battery life.
"By applying both techniques we have developed a way to achieve two goals at once - powering devices and the ability to verify a person's identity using a wearable device by capturing the energy generated from the way they walk," Ms Khalifa said.
Group Leader of the Networks Research Group at Data61 Professor Dali Kafaar said the technology was convenient and had scope to be more secure than other authentication modes.
"It is convenient because as we walk around each day our gait can be sampled continuously and verified without us having to manually adjust anything," he said.
" Since the KEH-gait keeps authenticating the user continuously, it collects a significant amount of information about our movements, making it difficult to imitate or hack unlike guessing passwords or pin codes."
The team's initial trial of 20 users delivered a 95 per cent accuracy rate and reduced energy consumption by 78 per cent when compared with previous energy sapping gait-recognition techniques.
The KEH-Gait system was also tested against 'attackers' who attempted to imitate an individual's motions. The analysis found only 13 out of 100 imposter trials were wrongfully accepted by the system.
Ms Khalifa and her team were working toward achieving 100 per cent accuracy.
They are building a second prototype, hoped to be finalised by year's end, which will be a third of the size and 300 per cent more powerful at harvesting energy from a user's movement.
With consumer pressure to improve battery life and the market for wearable devices booming, Ms Khalifa said she was confident their technology would be commercialised very soon.
Data61's privacy and authentication research team are exploring a variety of similar projects looking into the way our bodies innately interact with our devices.
Alongside KEH-gait sampling, they are looking at more secure and implicit continuous authentication techniques such as unique breathing patterns and other distinctive behavioural biometrics.
CSIRO's Data61 has created a video to show how gait-based authentication could work via an everyday phone app.
