The home can become smarter through innovative technologies. One of these is Nymi Band, a wearable, multi-factor authenticator that can be used with any application, device or service to deliver “Always On Authentication”. Through a single biometric authentication event, the Nymi Band creates a Personal Authentication Network around the user through its Bluetooth Low Energy and NFC transports. Once this network is activated, credentials can be securely and persistently relayed to provisioned devices within range, until the Nymi Band is removed from the user’s wrist. The product can authenticate the individual using a variety of biometric modalities, including HeartID. It’s a Nymi-built technology that uses an individual’s unique electrocardiogram (ECG) for authentication. Nymi was founded in 2011 in Toronto (Canada), based on research conducted at the University of Toronto. “The research – explains the company – was focused on the electrocardiogram and its unique properties. The ECG is different for each individual, and our founding team worked to use the heartbeat as a biometric identifier for authentication”. “Initially, Nymi (Bionym at the time) was focused on licensing this technology to third-parties and OEMs to replace passwords in hardware devices – adds the company -. Over time, the team identified the need not just to improve or replace existing tools of authentication, but to create a completely new model of authentication: continuous, on-body authentication. To bring this concept to market, it became necessary to develop dedicated authentication hardware. This served as the foundation of what was to become Nymi (December of 2014), and our product known as the Nymi Band”.
