Face ID? Touch ID? How about Body ID?

Face ID? Touch ID? How about Body ID? Apple has filed for a patent (number US 20230065288 A1) for “Electronic Devices with Body Composition Analysis Circuitry” that hints at a system where a user’s entire body can be scanned to confirm identity and perform health analysis.

About the patent filing

Obvious, devices such as iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and other equipment are sometimes provided with sensors such as fingerprint sensors, facial recognition cameras, and heart rate sensors. However, Apple says it can be challenging to use devices such as these. 

Why? The user may wish to obtain different types of health-related information that traditional electronic devices are unable to provide. The user may need to rely on more than one piece of electronic equipment to obtain the desired health-related information, which can be inconvenient and cumbersome.

Apple’s solution involves an electronic device with body composition analysis circuitry that estimates body composition based on captured images of a face, neck, and/or body (e.g., depth map images captured by a depth sensor, visible light and infrared images captured by image sensors, and/or other suitable images). 

Summary of the patent filing

Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent filing: “The body composition analysis circuitry may analyze the image data and may extract portions of the image data that strongly correlate with body composition, such as portions of the cheeks, neck, waist, etc. The body composition analysis circuitry may encode the image data into a latent space.

“The latent space may be based on a deep learning model that accounts for facial expression and neck pose in face/neck images and that accounts for breathing and body pose in body images. The body composition analysis circuitry may output an estimated body composition based on the image data and based on user demographic information.”