How to create memorizable and strong passwords

In a recent JMIR article, El Emam, Moreau and Jonker highlight the importance of using strong passwords to protect personal health information in clinical trials. An important implication that was not fully discussed is the potential problem people may have to create passwords that are complex but at the same time easy to remember. To address this problem we propose the PsychoPass methord, a simple way to create strong passwords which are easy to remember. This method relies on mental practice and is not an hardware or a software to download. The idea is that a password can be created, memorized and recalled by just thinking of an action sequence instead of a word or string of characters. To be more specific, the method consists of the following steps (see Figure 1 and 2): (1) begin with a letter on the keyboard; (2) memorize a sequence of actions (something like “the key on the left, then the upper one, then the one on the right”, and so on); (3) memorize the sequence (not the letters used); (4) create as many passwords as you want by remembering only the first letter and the sequence.