People can now be identified at a distance by their heartbeat

BEFORE PULLINGSOCSOCCTTSO the trigger, a sniper planning to assassinate an enemy operative must be sure the right person is in the cross-hairs. Western forces commonly use software that compares a suspect’s facial features or gait with those recorded in libraries of biometric data compiled by police and intelligence agencies. Such technology can, however, be foiled by a disguise, head-covering or even an affected limp. For this reason America’s Special Operations Command (), which oversees the units responsible for such operations in the various arms of America’s forces, has long wanted extra ways to confirm a potential target’s identity. Responding to a request from , the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (), an agency of the defence department, has now developed a new tool for the job.This system, dubbed Jetson, is able to measure, from up to 200 metres away, the minute vibrations induced in clothing by someone’s heartbeat. Since hearts differ in both shape and contraction pattern, the details of heartbeats differ, too. The effect of this on the fabric of garments produces what Ideal Innovations, a firm involved in the Jetson project, calls a “heartprint”—a pattern reckoned sufficiently distinctive to confirm someone’s identity.