“A lot of the science still needs to be worked out,” Narayanan admits, but says the team developing the skeletal scanner plans to have a prototype within a year and a marketable machine a year after.
Ryan D. Fendley, director of the research institute founded in 2007, said Wright State’s scanner was one of a dozen concepts the Central Intelligence Agency chose out of 500 proposals for the next wave in biometric identifiers.
“They hadn’t seen anything like it,” said Fendley.
Julie Skipper, a biomedical engineer, and Phani Kidambi, a research engineer, are developing the hardware and software that can image a skeleton and measure and identify a specific person’s bone structures for the Wright State Research Institute.
The developers see it being put to use at airports and other points of entry to the United States. The technology could help identify people more accurately than fingerprints or facial recognition software being used by homeland security.
“It is much more stable and could be integrated into other biometrics,” Kidambi said.
There are still research challenges to overcome before the Wright State Research Institute can be ready to submit the idea to the government for the next round of consideration sometime next year.
The amount of radiation in each scan needs to be limited and how the scans are initially obtained needs to be defined.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2342 or cmagan@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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