VibID: User Identification through Bio-Vibrometry

Abstract

User identification is an essential problem for security protection and data privacy preservation of wearable devices. With proper user identification, wearable devices can adopt personalized settings for different users, automatically label the corresponding data to protect user privacy, and help prevent illegal user spoofing attacks. Current user identification solutions proposed for wearable devices either rely on dedicated devices with high cost or require user intervention which is not convenient. In this work, we leverage the bio-vibrometry to enable a novel user identification solution for wearable devices in small-scale scenarios, e.g., household scenario. Unlike existing user identification solutions, our system only uses the low-cost sensors that are already available for most wearable devices. The key idea is that, when human body is exposed to a vibration excitation, the vibration response reflects the physical characteristics of user, i.e., the mass, stiffness and damping. Meanwhile, due to users' biological diversity, such physical characteristics of different users are quite distinctive. Therefore, we can leverage the discrepancy in users' vibration responses as an identifier. Based on this idea, we propose VibID, which only uses a low-cost vibration motor and accelerometer to generate an unobtrusive vibration to users' arms and capture the corresponding responses. By examining the vibration patterns at different frequencies, VibID builds an ensemble machine learning model to recognize who is using the device. Extensive experiments are conducted on human subjects to demonstrate that our system is reliable in small- scale scenarios and robust to various confounding factors, e.g., arm position, muscle state, user mobility and wearing location. We also show that, in an uncontrolled scenario of 8 users, our system can still ensure a identification accuracy above 91%.