New Biometrics Trend in COVID-19

New Biometrics Trend in COVID-19

With the outbreak of COVID-19 global pandemic, all sectors in the economy have been severely affected, including biometrics. These impacts on companies, developers, investors and customers in biometrics field are considered to be significant in the likely short and long-term period.

What is clear is that biometrics is among the key technology like AI, machine learning, in responding to the pandemic. In order to contain the quick and widespread of COVID-19, several governments and organizations are exploiting biometric systems in serve of patient screening, public safety monitoring. There is a rapid increase of biometrics to be introduced to control this infectious disease, namely as in border control, surveillance, healthcare, biotechnologies, transportation industry.

While it is a positive sign to iris recognition technology, it is absolutely circuit-breaking for a biometric verification technology that relies on a fingerprint or facial recognition.

Contactless Identification

The spread of COVID-19 has encouraged a shift away from touch-based to contactless technology, making fingerprint recognition modalities suffered a significant loss. Fingerprint revenue is forecasted to drop 22% from US$1.8 billion to US$6.6 billion in aftermath of the pandemic according to a recent report from global tech market advisory, ABI Research. As requiring the user to make direct physical contact, fingerprint verification system may increase the possibility of cross-contamination for subsequent users. This may end up resulting in the likelihood of inoculation of harmful contagious pathogens into the respiratory tract, an easy way for coronavirus to enter the immune system. Many researches have been carried out to discuss the infectious disease transmission through touch-based technology and praised the adaptation of contactless system like face or iris recognition. One country that has a great reliance on biometric identification is India is soon to experience the downturn of contact-only applications, forcing its government to effectively terminate all biometric-based access control, workforce management and attendance application in certain high-risk areas.

Iris Recognition To Be Dominant

As contact-based technology poses a great risk in terms of hygienic safety, the new normal of touchless recognition system has been created. At the same time, face recognition technology, to the surprise of many, started to face its crisis as masks become mandatory in public area. The process of mask removal to have their face recognition is severely dangerous as it raises the possibility of being infectious amongst community and is not user-friendly. Though some leading biometric providers have enabled the face recognition technology with sanitary masks, the algorithms are seen only as a way to temporary compromise. Taking this shift into consideration, iris recognition is considered to be best solution by far. This technology can bypass the partial concealment limitations of subjects wearing masks for health purpose during COVID-19 or veil for cultural purpose in daily normal.

IriTech is proud to be the world leading iris technology provider and surely provide the best quality to assist global efforts on healthcare, border control or any needed projects. With IriTech’s iris recognition technology, the contactless system can be achieved with ease at a cost-effective and highest accurate performance.