Timothy N. Chang, a professor of electrical engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, has developped a grip sensor that can measure the grip of a gun's owner. "Sensors in the handle measure the pressure the hand exerts as it squeezes the trigger. Then algorithms check the shooter's grip with stored, authorized patterns to give the go-ahead." Originally, this authentication system was designed to simply be a "child safety lock", where a child casually playing with the gun certainly wouldn't exert the same patterns of pressure as an adult would. However, the researchers discovered that people do seem to have a unique gripping style, and the gun could potentially be used to distinguish between the owner of the gun, and any other person.

The prototype already has an accuracy rate of 90% (it's not clear from the article whether 10% of the time, the authorized adult is not allowed to fire, or if 10% of the people other than the authorized adult were able to fire the gun), and the professor Chang hopes to improve this figure by adding more sensors, and focusing more on authenticating a single specific user, as opposed to using his device merely as a child lock.