Payments

SmartMetric adds energy harvesting tech to biometric card

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August 5, 2022

SmartMetric, a trademark of EMVCo, has unveiled energy harvesting technology to its card power system for contactless payments. The technology uses energy from the contactless card readers to power the card's internal processor to read a user's fingerprint, according to a press release.

When a user holds the card up to a contactless card reader, the card converts radio waves to power the fingerprint reader to confirm the user's identity.

"While our energy harvesting doesn't extract power from atmospheric vibrations or the globe's magnetic fields, we have been able to convert radio waves into energy that can power our biometric cards' circuits," Chaya Hendrick, CEO and president, SmartMetric, said in the release.

At the same time, the company will have to do more work to calibrate this feature, as the radio waves from POS devices are not standardized and the amount of time the user holds the card over the reader can also impact the feature. Thus, SmartMetric admits that this feature may not work on all contactless readers, according to the release.