# Tactical-Grade Wearables and Authentication Biometrics

## TL;DR

This paper reviews wearable technologies with biometric authentication for battlefield use, focusing on reliability, security, and performance in harsh conditions.

## Contribution

The paper proposes an R&D plan for rugged, trustworthy wearable authentication systems tailored for military use.

## Key findings

- Biometric modalities like ECG, PPG, and gait are reviewed for identity confirmation in high-stress environments.
- Security threats and techniques for template protection and liveness assurance are analyzed.
- Emerging trends include low-power edge AI and privacy-preserving analytics for defense readiness.

## Abstract

Modern battlefield operations require wearable technologies to operate reliably under harsh physical, environmental, and security conditions. This review looks at today and tomorrow’s potential for ready field-grade wearables embedded with biometric authentication systems. It details physiological, kinematic, and multimodal sensor platforms built to withstand rugged, high-stress environments, and reviews biometric modalities like ECG, PPG, EEG, gait, and voice for continuous or on-demand identity confirmation. Accuracy, latency, energy efficiency, and tolerance to motion artifacts, environmental extremes, and physiological variability are critical performance drivers. Security threats, such as spoofing and data tapping, and techniques for template protection, liveness assurance, and protected on-device processing also come under review. Emerging trends in low-power edge AI, multimodal integration, adaptive learning from field experience, and privacy-preserving analytics in terms of defense readiness, and ongoing challenges, such as gear interoperability, long-term stability of templates, and common stress-testing protocols, are assessed. In conclusion, an R&D plan to lead the development of rugged, trustworthy, and operationally validated wearable authentication systems for the current and future militaries is proposed.