Do you think this is useful technology, or bowing to demands of the anti gun crowd?
Company sees light with smart gun
By Dan Mayfield
Tribune Reporter
New technology that senses subtle differences in people's skin might make an Albuquerque company a prominent player in the handgun industry.
Albuquerque's Lumidigm makes what's known as a biometric sensor. Using intense light, it can perceive who's who and lock out people who shouldn't be using a specific device, such as a handgun.
Recently, Lumidigm (pronounced Luma-Dime) signed a development agreement with firearms manufacturer Smith & Wesson to design a fast, durable fool-proof sensor for a new gun, said Rick McCaskill, Lumidigm's vice president of business development.
"Of all the different systems I've seen, Lumidigm has the greatest potential," said Kevin Foley, vice president of product engineering for Smith & Wesson.
Smith & Wesson is working on designing a new type of "smart" handgun. The brains of the .40-caliber gun would allow only specific people to fire it.
"The concept at this point is to have a handgun that works only for authorized users. Ideally, six or less," Foley said.
The smart handgun has become one of the hottest topics in the gun industry in latest years. Proponents say the weapons can cut down on accidental shooting deaths.
In Albuquerque, the topic has received attention after an Albuquerque Police Department sergeant was shot with her own gun following a scuffle with a suspect earlier this month.
But opponents to the idea say smart guns have problems: The best designs are slow; they're cumbersome and can't be used in emergency situations.
They require users to enter a secret code - like at the ATM - or use special keys to unlock them.
That's where Lumidigm's sensor comes in.
Called LumiGuard, the sensor - about the size of a postage stamp - sends pulses of light into skin touching it.
Within one-third of a second, the device can rule out a person it doesn't recognize, McCaskill said.
It sounds complicated, but it really isn't, McCaskill said.
Children often put flashlights to their hands to see the deep red light shine through their palms.
It turns out that light is a slightly different color of red for everybody.
Lumidigm's sensor uses light to measure the thickness and density of the skin and its surrounding tissue and blood vessels. It works on skin from virtually any part of the body, with one hitch: The skin has to be alive
"Basically, we're measuring the difference in the structure of the skin," McCaskill said.
The brilliance of the sensor is that it's quick and uses relatively little power.
But that's not what police officers are concerned about.
"The biggest thing is the reliability," said Albuquerque police advanced training Sgt. Damon Fay. "When you need it, will it go?"
Yes, McCaskill said.
The simple light-emitting diodes LumiGuard uses are good for thousands of scans, McCaskill said. So far, the company has logged more than 6,000 scans on its test bed, and has error readings down to less than 1 percent.
The company's goal is to reduce that to less than one-tenth of 1 percent.
Lumidigm grew out of InLight Solutions, another Albuquerque company using light to measure biological signs.
About three years ago when InLight Solutions was designing its light-activated blood sugar monitoring system for diabetics, McCaskill said, the team hit a roadblock.
"There was a noise - a scattering," of the light, he said.
It hindered the blood sugar test.
But as more subjects were tested in an effort to figure out what was causing the scattering, the company discovered the scattering was unique to each person.
The company patented a sensor that measures the differences and spun out Lumidigm in 2001.
So far, Lumidigm has received $5 million in venture funding from groups such as Intel Capital. It's signed other development agreements with automotive parts supplier Visteon and lock maker Ingersoll-Rand.
McCaskill said the company sees its LumiGuard sensors finding their way into cell phones, personal data assistants or computers within three to five years.
The Smith & Wesson handgun is, at the very least, three years off, but it's promising, Foley said.
"It has the potential to be very small, very fast," he said, "and their tests show it's equal to, or better than, other biometric technologies."
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/busi...smartgun.shtml