In the future, the body odor will replace your passport

Spanish researchers say they have developed an "electronic hound" that can sniff people to prove their identity. This system will soon replace fingerprint scanner and iris scanner.

Researchers of the biometric group, biometric and security signals (GB2S) of the Politécnica de Madrid University (Spain) have collaborated with Ilía Sistemas SL to show that the current system has reached the main level. body up to 85%.

"Everyone has a recognizable stable odor pattern. So it is possible to accurately identify an individual in a group of people with odors with an accuracy greater than 85%," the team said. "This result will help improve personal identity by being less complex than biometric technologies in use today."

The complete system can be installed at the airport to "sniff" the passenger identification.

"The development of new sensors allows the collection of body odor to provide a less complex identification solution that can perform identification at the same time the user passes through the security door", the the researcher said.

"Today, identity identification at most airports and border checkpoints is based on the physical similarity between us and passport photos or people's identity cards. New electronic people are very hard to fake, but the use of biometric techniques based on one's physical characteristics will increase the safety of border checkpoints. such as iris scanning and fingerprint scanning have low error rates but are not suitable for widespread dissemination. On the other hand, other biometric identification technologies such as facial recognition have high error rates.

"Identity by body odor is not a new idea because it has been carried out for more than a century by police and military forces with the help of professional dogs. A person's mark by smelling their body of dogs is very popular and it proves that biometric techniques using body odor to identify themselves are effective. "

How does "electronic nose" work?

To capture the smell of a person, he or she is asked to put his or her hand in a small glass bottle.

The machine can "smell" the hand and translate it into a unique "chemical signature" of that person's smell.

Of course, the machine knows how to filter other odors such as perfume, hand lotion . from that chemical signature result and can modify the result due to illness that could affect it. to body odor.

Even, the machine can determine the time of day - something that can affect body odor - and change the smell reading results at that time of day.

Police forces can record a person's body odor in a way that they are currently sampling fingerprints and DNA and setting up " electronic nose " machines in public places to "sniff" criminals.