Aharon Farkash, the former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate and founder of the company FST21, is putting a new spin on biometrics. His firm’s software development technology not only catalogs voices and faces, but also evaluates the overall body shapes of people as they walk through a gate or checkpoint. Farkash looks over his budding technology favorably. “This is the way people will enter buildings in the twenty-first century,” he explains.

The State of Biometric Technology

The advances of FST21 and other biometric firms are well on their way to making passwords completely obsolete, as our own bodies could replace the jumbles of words and letters we’ve been so careful to guard and memorize.

Based out of 7 World Trade Center in New York, even FST21’s main office requires some interesting security measures to enter. In order to gain access, Farkash sends a unique code to a visitor’s smartphone. From there, the visitor faces their phone to a scanner, which verifies the code and lets them through.

But it’s not the code on the phone that’s the security measure here — it’s also the physical way the person presents the device. “Just like a fingerprint, we all look and act in a unique way,” Farkash says.

FST21 has a distinctive methodology of assessing the natural and unique ways the human body reaches, moves and sways. This makes for a nearly impossible to mimic, yet incredibly accurate, method of keying in identities.

For now, employees of FST21 are the only people who can come and go using this system, which utilizes an unassuming 8-inch scanner for movement pattern recognition.

Today, when someone thinks “biometric,” they think of iris scanners, or maybe the thumbprint identifier on the new iPhone. It’s fascinating to see just how much electrical engineering technology services are being unleashed that stretches far beyond these everyday styles, quantifying innate human characteristics that nobody even thought to measure before. Even though biometric security has been in existence for nearly 40 years, breakthroughs and security combinations such as those shown by Farkash at FST21 are shaping up to be the wave of the future.

Personally, Farkash believes that someday soon, biometrics security will be as commonplace — if not more so — as carrying a keychain.

“Cities are crowded, often dangerous places,” Farkash says. “We need a way to live safely, but also comfortably next door to one another.”