This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Smartphones can already verify your identity by scanning your fingerprint or your face,

but there's something inside you that's also unique proof. your to decode the unique geometry of a user's heart

and how it squeezes and swells as it beats.

That biometric information can authenticate the identity of the person under scrutiny.

And if the wrong person sits down?

So it would recognize there is a heart, but the geometry of my heart is different from yours, so it still

lock me out.

Wenya Shu is a computer scientist at the University of Buffalo, who helped develop the tech.

He says this unusual biometric is robust because it's actually two different biometrics.

The first is the shape of your heart,

a biologic biometric or static trait,

like fingerprints or iris patterns.

The second is the beating of your heart,

what's called a behavioral biometric, which analyzes a dynamic process and can be harder to spoof.

So far, they've tested the system on about 100 people, with an accuracy of over 98%.

They'll present the results this month at the Mobicom conference in Utah.

She says the radiation from the device isn't harmful,

just a fraction of what we get from our smartphones

but at a couple inches in size the unit's not quite ready to fit inside a

smartphone. Not yet we are waiting for the call from Apple.

Because you got to have heart, but you also got to have funding.

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