IDesia lets you shop with your electric pulse

You’ve probably heard of the fingerprint scanning technology that speed up grocery shopping by allowing you to pay with a finger swipe.

An Israeli company, IDesia, says it has come up with an even better method for finger scans: bio-electric signals. Many people don’t know they have a unique electric imprint, but Baruch Levanon, chief executive of the young company, was busy showing off his technology to attendees of a second venture capital conference in San Francisco a few days ago, sponsored by VentureOne.

The former Israel Air Force Lt. Colonel was a bit of a hit. He’ll have a tested version of the product out by the end of this year, and hopes to raise more venture capital in Silicon Valley at that point, he said. Last year, he raised more than $2 million from investors, including the San Francisco firm Partech International.

One feature he’s pushing first allows you to secure your computer devices by requiring a finger touch — similar to the fingerprint scan logins that some computer manufacturers already offer. But he hopes to get the technology into cell phones and handhelds first, he said, because people hold those anyway, and can enter their electrical password signals without even thinking about it.

We tried it out. First, his computer mapped our electric pulse, which took about thirty seconds. Then Levanon gave instructions to the computer to let nobody else in except us, as defined by our electric pulse. So when we touched the computer again, it recognized our unique pulse — which looks like a roller coaster, similar to this image above — and voila, it let us in.

Is this cool, or scary? We haven’t decided yet.

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