While at Innovations a couple of weeks back I stumbled across the Imprivata booth at the vendor expo. There were quite a few people gathered around the booth so I obliged my curiosity and squeezed in among the crowd. The Imprivata representatives were giving a demonstration of the company’s OneSign 4.5 application with Walk-Away technology. There must be something compelling about the Imprivata line of products as I found myself blogging about their OneSign Platform about this time last year.
The Walk-Away technology was impressive. As long as a user was standing in front of the computer camera they remained logged in. However, as soon as the user turned to walk away they were immediately logged out of their session. This is a significant step forward in managing those unattended workstations that one often finds throughout the hospital.
From the Imprivata website: “OneSign Secure Walk-Away closes a critical security gap in the protection of confidential information assets by automating the process of securing the desktop when a user ‘walks away’. Once a user has securely authenticated to the desktop using OneSign Authentication Management, OneSign Secure Walk-Away uses a combination of computer vision, active presence detection, and user tracking technologies to identify an authenticated user and automatically lock the desktop upon their departure.â€
You can read more about the system here (PDF). Try as I might I could not find a video demonstration of the Walk-Away system; too bad really as the system has to be seen to be appreciated. I’m not a big fan of single sign-on systems (SSO) in general for various reasons, but I’m willing to reconsider my position when SSO is used in combination with biometric identification, voice recognition or facial recognition technology. It’s just too cool to ignore.