Washington, December 21 (ANI): The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US has developed a new application for a handheld touch-screen device that may lead to the development of portable tool to identify fingerprints and faces.

The application was developed by the NIST as a result of a demand made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The FBI told NIST that they wanted something more portable than the 20-pound rugged laptop plus fingerprint scanner their hostage rescue teams lug around to aid in their anti-terrorism efforts, and this led to NIST developing the application for a handheld touch-screen device.

The original task given to NIST by the FBI was simply to design and compile the requirements for the software the FBI needed to run on their platform of choice: a handheld device with a touch screen about the size of an index card.

NIST researchers Mary Theofanos, Brian Stanton, Yee-Yin Choong and Ross Micheals brainstormed with the FBI team about what they required.

Despite having worked closely with the NIST team, even the FBI Hostage Rescue Team was surprised at how well the ultimate design matched their needs: a small tool that could take pictures of fingerprints or faces and send the data wirelessly to a central hub for analysis, all with a minimum of touch strokes.

But Theofanos, Stanton and Choong wanted to take the program further, by envisioning smart phones with touch screen devices that could identify fingerprints and faces.

The team created a demo program for just such an available screen-and it scaled beautifully.

The NIST team already had been collaborating with other security agencies on something called Mobile ID, a method to help officers identify people quickly and easily on the scene, instead of taking people back to headquarters to be fingerprinted.

According to the NIST researchers, this demo program might just be the solution.

The next step is to integrate an actual finger print sensor into the demo program. (ANI)