sept 6 2013151 think of all the ways that movie spies fool security systems that use the human body they could lift someones fingerprint from a discarded beer bottle or get an eye pattern by photographing someones eyeball but a new company called bionym is going a little deeper than most spies would go bionyms debut product nymi will read a users heart rhythm through an electrocardiogram ecg as a means of identification nymi is currently available for preorder for 79 and is slated to ship early next year the company imagines users strapping nymi to their wrists the first thing in the morning it quickly reads the wearers heartbeat and determines whether the wearer and the identity stored in the bracelet are one in the same from there nymi would act as an interface to other electronics broadcasting the owners identity to computers mobile devices cash registers and smart appliances the heart may seem like an unusual place for an identifier but karl martin the ceo of bionym said that nymis authentication procedure is rooted in good science all ecgs have the same general shape but some have different slopes or sharper peaks he told abc news we have automated algorithms that extract those types of features and create a unique template martin added that there are plenty of differences to differentiate one persons ecg from any other persons the uniqueness of an ecg is about the same level as that of a fingerprints he said christopher ellis a heart rhythm specialist at the vanderbilt heart and vascular institute said thats interesting in theory but is not sure how it will work in practice i read about 30000 ecgs a year and can tell the difference between a normal one and an abnormal one he said but if you take two healthy 18yearold boys and look at their ecgs theyll look pretty similar he also said that reading ecgs from the wrist isnt the best place to do so its like looking at fingerprints they might have a lot of unique information but you wont be able to read any of it if theyre all smudged baby sock wirelessly monitors breathing heart rate the thought of putting your identity into an updated slap bracelet might make some users feel uneasy however martin has made security a top priority for the nymi we have a chip called the secure element that encrypts all the information coming out of the wrist band he said the data is encrypted at a hardware level in addition nymi is deactivated once unfastened from the owners wrist in order to reactivate it the user has to strap it to his or her wrist for a new ecg reading if a thief takes the bracelet in the middle of a night its pretty much useless because they wont be able to authenticate though nymi isnt intended for any type of medical diagnosis ellis sees it as something that could be useful to the medical community