Feasibility of using Gyroscope to Derive Keys for Mobile Phone and Smart Wearable

In the past few years, smart healthcare has become a popular topic. Many users wear smart devices to monitor their health conditions. To provide information for health analysis, many sensors are installed in smart wearable devices to collect personal health data. Due to the limitation of space and computational power, private health data is not processed locally. Instead, it is usually sent to a mobile phone for further analysis, which required wireless data exchange between the mobile phone and smart wearable devices. To protect a user’s privacy, it is important to guarantee the connection security of the devices’ network as well as prevent information leakage. A possible method to secure the data exchange process is symmetric encryption. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of symmetric key generation for communication between a mobile phone and smart wearable device using angular velocity data collected by gyroscopes as data source. We collected over 1000 samples of gait data, totally more than 20000 seconds of movements, using two industrial products including a smart watch and mobile phone placed on wrist and in pocket respectively. We successfully generated the same random number for mobile phone and smart wearable device in 78% samples.