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The evolution of biometrics

According to a recent Gartner study in the US, roughly 15 million people were victims of identity theft in 2006. To put it into perspective that means there was a new victim every two seconds. With this statistic it is clear to see it is only a matter of time before the world advanced its technologies to achieve accurate identification.

The world's answer to the identification issue was biometrics, developed to consistently identify people both accurately and quickly, with security being the key motivator. From access to your work or using credit cards right through to using biometric chips embedded to reduce passport fraud, the ability to manage identity securely remains a fundamental issue.

The past

Biometrics developed as the art of identification by either behavioural or physiological patterns. Physiological identification involves any of the following aspects: the face, fingerprint, hand, iris or DNA while behavioural biometrics looks at signature, keystroke or voice recognition. It was developed out of criminal investigation, in response to requirements for accelerated fingerprint identification and management through automated electronic systems.

As biometrics technologies advance they need to be compared with each other and measured against certain criteria to establish the most suitable technology for a specific environment. The technologies are measured against criteria such as whether every person has a certain characteristic, whether the characteristic alters with age, whether it can be easily falsified or substituted and whether it successfully separates individuals.

The present

In today's market, all industries are benefiting from biometrics technology. We have solutions installed across the board from healthcare, mining to supermarket and retail and manufacturing. The driving factor being it is a very flexible solution with benefits such as eliminating buddy punching and fraudulent clocking in the time and attendance industry, to ensuring positive identification in the security industry.

Because it relies on accuracy biometrics gives the end user an almost 100% positive identification of the person transacting on a system, be that an access control system, time and attendance or logging onto a PC. It can even go as far as positively identifying visitors who come onto your premises and even a person transacting with their department store card or loyalty card.

There are many emerging technologies in today's biometrics environment, such as facial, iris and vein recognition, but the current technology of choice is fingerprint technology. Hand and finger geometry systems really have no place in the modern workplace, simply because they cannot match the competencies of the leading fingerprint technology.

The future

In the future I foresee biometrics gaining extended usage across all types of workplace environments and increasing, continued dominance of fingerprint biometrics. Amongst both vendors and end users, we foresee an expanding understanding of how to work effectively with biometrics. We see this particularly in relation to enrolment and ensuring that the biometric data is of the correct quality and securely managed and in a nutshell, a wider and deeper understanding in general of how to fully capitalise on all the benefits created by biometric technology.

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