GII Tech leads new round to commercialize Nymi BandTM wearable authenticator for enterprise use.

The wristband device is designed to offer continuous authentication through cardiac biometrics, measuring the wearer’s pulse and using its unique rhythmic patterns for identification.

Atos is launching a secure authentication method through its Bull technological brand that uses the wearable authentication device Nymi Band to verify the user’s identity by analyzing their heartbeat.

Windows Hello is now found on almost 100 biometric-enabled devices. Here are some of the most interesting options for using the platform.

While the Royal Bank of Canada has already teamed up with Bionym to test out the Nymi Band, Halifax is the first bank in the U.K. to test wearable electronic bands that use customers' heartbeats to verify their identity. 

Toronto-based Bionym has struck a deal with Mastercard and a number of banks to do a pilot project where Canadians will use the wearable wrist band as a contact less payment method. 

Bionym co-founder and CEO Karl Martin and InteraXon co-founder and CEO Ariel Garten took home top honours and $25,000 each for their work innovating wearable technology.

Bionym Inc., a Toronto-based company working on what could be the world's first wearable authentication device, announced today that manufacturing has begun on the Nymi Bad, a new wearable device designed to use your unique heart rhythms to authenticate your identity for everything from your smartphone to your car door is being shipped to developers. 

Future-forward Canadian startup Bionym is working on it. The company just announced a $14 million Series A led by Ignition Partners and Relay Ventures who are banking on Bionym’s wearable, the Nymi catching on.

The best passwords are complicated and hard to remember. Even then, they're still hackable. Here are three start-ups creating better alternatives.

The Nymi armband from Toronto-startup Bionym is edging closer to reality, and a new partnership announced today helps make it more clear how it’ll be useful to everyday consumers. Bionym is teaming up with PasswordBox to make it possible to authenticate your mobile logins using your heart rate automatically, for super fast access to sites, devices and services.

At SXSW this year, Nymi ran an experiment to let users try out the technology at a series of pop-up events. For instance, when I registered for a demo wristband, I listed my favorite drink. When I tapped the wristband on a reader at the bar, the bartender made the drink and called me by name. At another event, users could use the Nymi to request their favorite songs from a DJ. Drinks and tunes may seem like superficial use cases, but it’s easy to imagine the implications for payment, device management, the connected home and personalization. The thing that excites me most about Nymi is its potential to eliminate the password. The modern password, with its mix of capital letters, numbers and punctuation, is a terrible user experience. Password managers try to mitigate the issue, but they’re hardly an elegant solution.

Toronto-based wearable startup Bionym’s Nymi band uses your ECG to securely identify you to various devices and services, and as of today there’s another trick up its sleeve – acting as a secure, easy to use Bitcoin wallet. The company revealed today that one of the launch applications that will ship with the Nymi will be a Bitcoin wallet, and that said wallet will provide a more secure method of storing your account’s private key...What Nymi brings to the table is a way to keep the private key securely stored independent of any computer, and tied to your unique ECG biometric signature. This makes it not only secure, but also more convenient than existing Bitcoin wallet solutions, Bionym President Andrew D’Souza explained in an interview.

Here are a few examples of how you could use Nymi. Let's say Bank of America develops an app for Nymi, that means you could simply wave your wrist any time you want to pay for something.Or, let's say you're deathly allergic to peanuts, have an allergic reaction, and end up unconscious on the street without your ID card. The emergency response team shows up, but they have no idea who you are or what happened to you. With Nymi, they could quickly figure out who you are, your medical history, and what you're allergic to.

Anyone who has watched a medical drama can picture an electrocardiogram (ECG)—the five peaks and troughs, known as a PQRST pattern (see picture), that map each heartbeat. The shape of this pattern is affected by such things as the heart’s size, its shape and its position in the body. Cardiologists have known since 1964 that everyone’s heartbeat is thus unique, and researchers around the world have been trying to turn that knowledge into a viable biometric system. Until now, they have had little success. One group may, though, have cracked it.

Among the most novel — and also somewhat unsettling — of biometric authentication tools is a new wristband developed by cryptographers at the University of Toronto. It contains a voltmeter to read a heartbeat. “You put it on. It knows it’s you. It communicates that identity securely to everything around you,” said Karl Martin, one of its creators. Security is a primary selling point of the wristband, Nymi. While a heart can be broken, Mr. Martin promises that a heartbeat cannot.

Like fingerprints, heart rhythms are unique. The peaks and troughs mapped out by an electrocardiogram are affected by the heart’s unique characteristics, including size and shape. A company called Bionym is working to make passwords obsolete by using a person’s heart rhythm as a biometric pass code.

Martin an his team have created the Nymi, a plastic wristband that is aiming to be the common thread that connects your identity to the smart devices of the future. Born out of research done at the University of Toronto, the device uses a biometric sensor to authenticate identity through a person’s unique electrocardiogram. Which is a fancy way of saying, the pattern of your heartbeat could be your new set of keys. The Bionym team found a way to extract features of your heartbeat that allows them to create a robust biometric template. So if you get nervous and your heart speeds up or you just ran a few miles, the waveform of your heartbeat might appear more condensed, but it’s still essentially the same pattern. The idea is that users will strap on the Nymi each morning, touch the topside sensor to read their ECG and will be constantly authenticated until they decide to take it off.