Touch ID, Face ID… Apple has had a few different ways of unlocking its devices. It’s also lodged hundreds of different patents for different unlocking methods, and one was just granted by the US patent office — and it uses your heartbeat?
According to the patent, it would use your unique ‘BioID’ to open your iPhone, or another device — although how it actually works is, to the layperson (like me) mostly techno-babble and mysterious uses of the words ‘integrate cardiac sensor’.
Unlocking your phone… with the beat of your heart
We can glean a couple of things from the patent as to how it might work. Apparently, it would use different elements of the heartbeat to work out who you are — after all, no one’s heartbeat is exactly the same. Beyond that, there’s not much, only that there would be readers included in different devices.
Apple has a history of different patents for features that never see it to actual devices, and this one certainly seems exactly along those lines. The only real place that we could see this happening would be on an Apple Watch, although given how the watch already unlocks itself when close to an iPhone it feels slightly like a waste of time.
Patents like this often have a number of reasons to exist. Some are so that real, useable ideas can be claimed and copyrighted, while others are to make sure that a potential, blue sky idea is not stolen by another company. This one seems to be the latter.
Either way, the latest upcoming iPhone 16 and 16 Pro aren’t likely to have any kind of heart rate monitoring device on board, let alone one that would unlock the device instead of FaceID. They will, however, be able to support the latest version of iOS, including the upcoming Apple Intelligence features, which we’re already playing within the developer beta of the software.