Vancouver company develops shoe-based gait biometrics

You just knew it would come: Foot biometrics. Plantiga Technologies, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based startup, is turning a homespun invention for comfortable shoes into a new source of biometric data. The pre-funding company has little more right now than a rather vague Web site and some patent applications, but founder Quin Sandler asserts in a conversation with the Register that his company’s ideas is a “changing concept adaptable architecture” for constructing shoes — but then backtracks (on legal counsel) to describe only an “enclosure for interlocking structures.” He then modifies this to “components which create an adaptable interface between floor and person”: A new way of making shoes and extracting data from them. The company has not yet made any shoes, nor extracted any data. As Sandler says, “We’re above concept, but below prototype… we believe it’s cool, but we still need to make it,” presumably after they get the first one or two million dollars.

That money will create the shoe itself, a comfortable and cushy distributed shock-absorber which for secret reasons will be more comfortable than what’s on offer now. This is a lot to spend on a new but low-tech shoe, without actuators or adaptive algorithms. How does that traditional footwear become high-tech footware? The brand-new piece is what Sandler calls gait biometrics, a term for identifying an individual based on signals transmitted from his feet. Gait biometrics itself is an idea that has been around for a year or so, and we have written a few stories about it. Plantiga’s innovation, rather, is that those soon-to-be-patented components of the shoe would transmit real-time pressure signals to readers at checkpoints, and these form the basis of a new dynamic biometric profile. Rather like voice-printing, or dynamic signature capture. Each person’s feet offer a different signal.

Sandler admits the biometric development is “very immature,” with “no mathematical development done.” He is excited, though, about the fact that his his approach uses a continuous stream of real-time data, in contrast to single point of control systems such as fingerprints and iris-scans.

Immature foot biometrics may be, but Sandler has just got a call from the Pentagon’s skunk-works research agency DARPA.