Defining Habituation using Hand Geometry

The word “habituation” has many meanings within the biometric community. Most people define the concept of habituation as “continued use of a biometric device.” When a user is habituated, he or she is capable of providing repeatable samples to the biometric sensor, and the performance scores of the biometric sensor, relative to that user, have stabilized. This paper establishes a model of the processes of habituation and provides score data from hand geometry to show how this concept works with actual data. We illustrate a four-step process of a user’s interaction with the device and describe how the data seems to prove that an individual becomes fully habituated after repeated use of the device. The type and amount of user training, and number of interaction attempts are shown to have an impact on the biometric sensor’s performance scores.