Dipartimento di Informatica

The issue published in February of the Italian popular magazine Focus mentions our Department and the work of the team led by our colleague Maria De Marsico on gait recognition using wearable accelerometers, especially those embedded into modern smartphones and smartwatches. The article generally deals with recent advances in the analysis of individual gait patterns. In particular, it mentions the prototype developed by Maria's team for the automatic opening of protected doors after recognizing the gait signal produced by an accelerometer worn by a registered user. The dynamics of the signals produced by human movements, from walking to the way of writing one's signature, constitute a promising line of research both for the wide availability of wearable sensors (just think of the diffusion of smart devices of various types) and for the difficulty in mimicking these biometric traits even by experienced attackers. Furthermore, compared to the techniques based on video processing, the user is more aware of the recognition and consequently user’s privacy is better preserved. It is necessary to continue experimenting with new strategies for representing the data obtained and evaluating the performance achieved to increase the robustness of the techniques used, but the results are promising.