Many people find themselves locked out of their accounts for hours as suffer from what the internet has coined “passworditis” – forgetting a password.

In the future, smartphones and tablets will allow access at the sight of their owners face or a single touch.

The Sunday Times reported that software giants Google and Apple are introducing phones which identify users through sight and touch recognition.

Last week Apple applied to the US patent office to register facial recognition software, so instead of sliding to unlock your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, you could simply point it at your face.

The patent entitled “Low Threshold Face Recognition”, was picked up by Apple Insider blog, who said that “using a forward-facing camera to recognize an individual user, future iPhones and iPads from Apple could automatically customize applications, settings and features to a user’s personal preferences once they pick up the device”.

Insider explained that Apple’s application stated rather than analyzing a user’s entire face which can drain the battery, the concept would rely on a “high information portion of a human face”.

This means potential parts of the face that could be analyzed may include eyes, a mouth, or the tip of a user’s nose.

It is understood the system will scale the distance between a users eyes and mouth and once it has measured that against the image originally captured, it will be able to confirm that it is the same person and unlock.

The patent also details that each user could customize their personal profile with unique wallpaper, applications and settings, and that profile would be immediately accessed once the iPad recognizes a user’s face.

New phones using Google’s Andriod platform already have a face recognition tool that uses the inbuilt camera.

The progress may be welcomed by many people, as according to a 2008 study by Trinity College Dublin, the average person has to remember five passwords, five pins, two numberplates, three security ID numbers and three bank accounts.

However it may not yet be effective to completely eradicate passwords in favor of facial recognition – within days of the Google Android facial recognition tool being launched, there were reports online that claimed it could be fooled by holding a photograph of the owners face up to the device.