Product Design: Swedish student's system to pay at shops by using vein scanning!

Us Brits are meant to be huge fans of queuing but in actual fact we’re even bigger fans of speeding up these processes. Already we’ve seen contactless payments remove the time-consuming pin-entry procedure but now a Swedish student has gone one better with a system that SCANS YOUR VEINS.

Fredrik Leifland got the idea while stuck in a painfully slow supermarket queue and so he and some fellow classmates at Lund University looked into whether existing vein scanning technology could be used as part of a payment system.

“We had to connect all the players ourselves, which was quite complex: the vein scanning terminals, the banks, the stores and the customers,” he says. “The next step was finding ways of packaging it into a solution that was user friendly. Every individual’s vein pattern is completely unique, so there really is no way of committing fraud with this system. You always need your hand scanned for a payment to go through.”

So far 15 stores and restaurants in and around the university campus have adopted the futuristic technology and more than 1,600 people make use of the handy alternative to messing about with key pads.

While it sounds like pure science fiction, Frederik’s system could alleviate some of the most day-to-day tedium we endure.