Biometrics—Ready for mainstream?
We’ve been hearing a lot about biometrics lately I think maybe we are at the tipping point when it comes into more widespread use. I recently spoke to John Trader at M2SYS Technology and he gave me a summary of where biometrics has been, it’s challenges, and now, how the move to a hybrid form may be just what integrators—and their end users—are looking for. He said that modern biometric identification technology must be flexible to ensure reliability. Here’s what else he said:
“When the modern era of adopting biometric technology in the private sector began approximately five to six years ago, choosing a biometric system to deploy was easy. An end user simply explained the specs of their project to several potential Integrators who served their vertical market, evaluated the offers and usually went with the lowest price option that did the job effectively. At the time, fingerprint technology was the only biometric modality that was available at an affordable implementation price so biometric hardware options were limited. However, as more and more businesses adopted biometric technology, many found that fingerprint technology did not turn out to be the “one-size fits all” technology that they had hoped.
More integrators realized that due to user or environmental variables, fingerprint technology had limited functionality to enable widespread identification and authentication for all of their end users. Variables (age, ethnicity, climate, etc.) that directly impacted the integrity of an individual’s fingerprint were rendering biometric fingerprint technology limited in its capacity to work for a certain percentage of the population using the fingerprint readers. Those integrators seeking a biometric authentication and identification interface were beginning to understand that fingerprint technology had subtle limitations to be an across-the-board solution. At one point, fingerprint recognition was a perfect solution for small scale security deployments but as the internal biometric needs of an organization began to grow and expand to larger scale security applications, biometric technology deployments required more customization to satisfy the dynamic conditions that end users faced for a larger population size.