Blood vein mouse
USB fingerprint scanners were available in the early 2000s but Fujitsu thought of a new way to authenticate users, one that is frankly a bit creepy. The company made a mouse with scanners built into the palm rest that could verify a person’s identity using the pattern of their blood veins. The goal was for this technology to find its way into PCs and other gadgets, and to be used for authenticating transactions.
As strange as it sounds, the blood vein scanner supposedly worked, accurately matching the blood veins of all 700 testers, and Fujitsu reckoned at the time that it could reach an error rate of 0.5% or less. This sci-fi mouse sounds like a fairly convenient method of biometric authentication (perhaps not any more so than the methods we use today) but was never released to the public.
Read our original article on the Fujitsu mouse from 2002.
