Replacing ATM Card with Smartphone LED Flash Light

Abstract

Over the last decade, automatic teller machines (ATMs), electronic banking transactions, smart and mobile payments were introduced and rapidly became essential for business activities. Nowadays, bank account owners rely on such methods for managing their everyday finances. On the other hand, the dependence on smartphones has rapidly increased within the past few years to become a vital hybrid personal assistant by executing several other functions beside phone calls and texting. Smartphones have replaced many electronic devices and for that reason, it is of great interest to use such phones to replace magnetic cards. This study experimentally transmits the required information on the magnetic card using mobile smartphones to the ATM or card readers over a visible light communication channel at high data rates. This research encodes the camera flashlight embedded in almost every smartphone with the required information with no additional hardware on the receiver end. However, a small sized non-expensive module is added to ATMs and card readers to detect and decode the received data. In this study, data has been transmitted using currently available smartphone flashlight type namely, light emitting diode (LED). Adapted modulation techniques were used for flashlight in order to maximize synchronization and therefore optimize transmission. Error-free transmission has been achieved by employing the proposed unidirectional light shielded optical link with speeds up to 500 bps for LED flashlight. The performance of the proposed system is measured under the effect of a noisy channel and at different distances between the transmitter and receiver. Furthermore, the system ensures more speed and security than the regular ATM transaction.