Filings from Apple over the past two years reveal that the company is constantly looking to improve upon the ways in which customers interact with its multi-touch devices, the latest of which proposes methods for controlling iPods and iPhones by detecting and using a user’s fingerprints.

More specifically, the filing lodged with the United States Patent and Trademark Office by iPod grandfather Anthony Fadell last year, outlines multi-touch software that can store user input signatures, including various fingerprint signatures, each of which can be assigned to trigger a certain task or event.

“Many conventional electronic devices may incorporate user interfaces that require a user to look at the interface in order to interact with it,” Apple wrote in the filing. “Unfortunately, in some situations, a user may not be able to or it may not be safe for the user to do so. For example, a consumer may not be able to look at a user interface while the user is performing some activities (e.g., driving or exercising).

“Furthermore, as people become increasingly active and mobile, they are demanding increasingly smaller electronic devices. The design of smaller devices can be limited, however, by user interfaces that require numerous user input mechanisms to provide an appropriate scope of user interaction with the devices.”

Put simply, Apple’s proposal calls for iPods and iPhones to store unique compositions of a user’s fingerprints as fingerprint signatures, which can, in turn, be associated with user-selectable commands. Similar to a multi-touch gestures, a user would provide a composition of fingerprints to the devices that match one of the fingerprint signatures they’ve pre-configures, at which point the device would initiate the associated command.