In the wake of the London bombings, BusinessWeek has put together a cover story on “The State of Surveillance.” Most of the tech discussed in the piece should be pretty familiar to Defense Tech readers — face scanners, RFID tags, yadda yadda.
But the article also mentioned a sci-fi sounding research thrust I hadn’t heard of before: “a little chemical lab analyzes the sweat, body odor, and skin flakes in the human thermal plume — the halo of heat that surrounds each person.”
In the quest to sort bad guys from good, scientists are poking ever more intimately at the core of each person’s identity — right down to the DNA. One day people’s distinctive body odor, breath, or saliva could serve as an identifier, based on the subtle composite of chemicals that make up a person’s scent or spit. One’s smell “is a cocktail of hundreds of molecules,” says Frank V. Bright, a chemistry professor at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. “The question is whether it’s a gin and tonic or a margarita.” While some of these sensors perform well in the lab, he adds, the real world may be different: “The technology is still in its infancy.“
Science today is hard put to identify smells a beagle could nail in an instant. “We want to show there is a set of underlying odors in people independent of perfume and what they ate that day,” says Gary K. Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a pioneer of odor prints.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Well it will be more secure than RFID…
If people are worried about having data read from their RFID tag and re-transmitted in any form of identity theft, I’d like to see them do the same with this!
well, if the technology is there, go for it. but damn, next time you post a pic like that, have a WARNING first.
Steve
US Navy
Steve beat me to the comment.
Which quirky website did you download the pic from? ;-)
One big challenge to smell-based sensors is that when you change soap or shave cream you “become different person (i.e. a different “smell print”).
We don’t know the “base” smells of a person yet, much less have detectors that are tuned to those substances. Besides most of this smelling will be from (at least) a few feet away so any base smells are contaminated with the other body fragrances (even clothes detergent used). That is one reason a dog sticks his nose right up THERE to ID another dog…
It’s all years away…
Like the picture.
let me know the URL ofthe above fuzzy pic.
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