Most Hollywood directors treat biometrics as a technology of the future. Top-secret laboratories are accessed via a retina scan, a fingerprint scan gives you access to classified information, and hi-tech cars are powered up using voice recognition. But really, is biometrics a future technology, or is it something that has been in existence since ages?
What is Biometrics?
According to dictionary.com, biometrics is the statistical study of biological phenomena. Or, as the Oxford Dictionary would have it, the application of statistical methods to biological facts. Simply put, anything that considers physiological characteristics for identification, can be termed biometrics.
In the old days, people were identified by physical characteristics such as birthmarks and scars-that was biometrics then. Today, we have devices that do a similar job and more accurately.
Modern biometrics can trace its birth to the 1880s when Henry Faulds, a doctor and Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist, in two separate publications, suggested the use of finger prints in crime detection -or rather, to the use it was put by Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean Police Inspector, in a murder case in 1892.
Since those days, techniques have been refined and newer ‘identifying techniques’ identified. As our understanding of physiological characteristics deepens along with our progress in technology we can expect newer biometric devices that measure newer physiological traits. But lets not get too ahead of ourselves, lets look at biometrics as it stands today.
More Tags :