ID-checking palm scanners could be coming to smartphones courtesy of Fujitsu

While others obsess over fingers, Fujitsu wants your palms instead. Going against the flow, it plans to employ palm-vein scanning on smartphones in the future. The company, who is one of its few, if not the only, commercial evangelists, believes the technology to be more secure and reliable than TV’s favorite metacarpal. Being a trendsetter, Apple ushered in an age of smartphones that use biometrics, particularly fingerprints, as an optional or secondary authentication factor.

Fujitsu may incorporate its palm scanners in smartphones as a means of verifying a user’s identity. The company’s PalmSecure scanners use near-infrared light to scan points in veins that lie beneath the surface of a user’s palm. There has to be blood flowing through a user’s hand for the sensor to work. Every person’s palm pattern is unique, and scans of vein points are matched against previously registered scans to authenticate users and unlock whatever device or service they’re linked to. “We have been reducing the size of our palm vein authentication units since their initial development,” a Fujitsu spokesman said. “In the future, we hope to eventually have these units embedded into smartphones.”