User Authentication Using Inner-Wrist Skin Prints: Feasibility and Performance Assessment with Off-the-Shelf Fingerprint Sensor.

Wrist-worn devices enable new paradigms of implicit and continuous user authentication; however, identifying biometric modalities that combine reliability with practical integrability remains challenging. Inner-wrist skin texture represents a relatively unexplored biometric characteristic that may be acquired unobtrusively using commodity hardware. This study evaluates biometric verification based on inner-wrist skin texture using an off-the-shelf capacitive fingerprint sensor and an unmodified, manufacturer-provided fingerprint verification algorithm. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 assessed baseline verification performance under controlled acquisition conditions in a cohort of 33 participants (21 male, 12 female; mean age 30.0 ± 16.9 years, range 10-71 years), yielding 1768 genuine authentication trials. Experiment 2 examined the effect of wrist posture variation under controlled flexion in a separate cohort of 15 participants (11 male, 4 female; mean age 30.9 years, range 18-49 years), with 3900 authentication trials recorded. Across 86,897 impostor comparisons in Experiment 1, no false acceptances were observed, corresponding to a conservative upper bound on the false acceptance rate of 6.7 × 10