Follow My Voice: The Future of PHR Authentication

The current electronic personal health record (PHR) has low patient adoption [1]. Increasing use and adoption of the PHR will improve patient-centered care. Users often have difficulty remembering passwords or share them, giving multiple people access to one account.Utilizing biometrics for authentication is becoming more common in our daily lives – think of the fingerprint sensor on a smartphone or retina scanners at high security corporations. The quickly evolving technology that runs our lives calls for incorporating biometric authentication into more systems. Using biometric authentication can ensure that passwords would not need to be remembered and that only the registered user has access to the account. A highly useable and accessible biometric to use is voice. Everyone has a unique voice that can be used for authentication. Also, phones are readily available to use for voice detection. The proposed research is to assess electronic PHR users’ acceptance towards using voice authentication.To verify a user logging into a system, identification and authentication must occur. Most often, the user is identified with their user ID name or number. The user then enters their password for authentication. Tokens, such as smart cards, may also be used as authentication. These methods examine what you know or what you have, while biometrics examine who you are [2].