Future Apple Watch Bands Can Authenticate You By Your Skin Texture

Right now, the Apple Watch has a method of identify and authenticating a user when they make a payment through Apple Pay. However, the problem with this current method is that if you take your watch off and put it back on, you’ll need to authenticate yourself again. We can appreciate the security measures, but it does seem a bit inconvenient.

However, it seems that in the future, Apple could have other methods of identifying the user. In a series of recently-discovered patents by Patently Apple, it appears that one of the patents suggests that Apple is looking into the idea of building a biometric sensor into the Apple Watch band where it can help identify and authenticate the user based on their skin texture.

According to the patent’s description, “More particularly, skin texture cracks are generally warmer than the surrounding skin, and hair is cooler than the surrounding skin. By using an IR thermal image sensor as the wrist biometric sensor, hair can be distinguished, thermally, from skin texture cracks by temperature.”

Not only would this eliminate the need to enter a passcode, but it could also grant the Apple Watch even greater independence from the iPhone, which Apple has kind of started the ball rolling when they introduced LTE support to the Apple Watch. This isn’t the first time that we’re hearing about Apple’s plans for a smart band, but whether or not it will materialize remains to be seen.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Gadgets
Tags: Apple Watch, Patent, Smartwatch, Wearable Tech