CCO Ben Carter at Biometric Summit New York: B-Secur Showcasing Innovation in Biometrics

This year’s Biometric Summit New York was a fantastic meeting of minds on all things in biometric innovation. We were delighted to be an innovation sponsor of the event, at which B-Secur CCO Ben Carter was asked to lead a great session on ‘Showcasing Innovation’.

Catch up on the highlights of the session in this interview Ben took part in with CEO of Goode Intelligence and the summit’s founder, Alan Goode. Biometric technology continues to innovate rapidly with new uses appearing to make the process of authentication and verification more convenient and secure to support the increasing use of digital identity.

Tell us about how your business has grown with some of your recent highlights and how you’re expecting to evolve.
In the last four and a half years we’ve had a rapid journey from a deep R&D university-led project through to now having around 40 full-time employees, working across technology, science, commercial and operations. This growth has been driven by the development of ‘HeartKey®’, a world-first, next generation biometric product.

I’m excited to see that ECG technology is moving into the mainstream – something just recently underlined by the announcement of ECG technology within the Apple Watch Series 4. We are seeing increasing demand for ECG technology coming from industries including automotive, healthcare and health and wellness.

Explore HeartKey

For those looking to deploy biometric technology in their organisation, or in their products, what are the key things that you would advise them to consider?
Understanding the potential of each biometric modality and their corresponding use cases is essential alongside the benefits for implementing each, for example, comprehending the impact of stress in the workplace or reducing staff absence and turnover. And of course, the efficient management and security of health data – something that is often sensitive and personal. We’re also seeing a growing and significant ecosystem where all devices have IoT connectivity and consumers will be able to access their ECG health and wellness information all day, every day. We believe this will be a fundamental development in how individuals manage their health.

“There’s a wealth of information and data coming from the human body that we’re beginning to collect, and machine learning and AI are the tools we can use to ensure we’re getting the full benefit. Your car, your phone or your watch can help you live a longer and healthier life.”
Ben Carter, B-Secur CCO

So looking at how the use of biometrics technology can improve our everyday lives, what do you think the future has in store?
Machine Learning (ML) and AI technology will unlock new insights into the data we’re collecting. When applied to biometric tech we can rapidly increase the security of our systems by utilising features that would not have been obvious or recognised with traditional methods. As biometrics become more accepted multi-modal solutions are becoming more popular to further increase security; ML and AI provides a reliable method of collating and integrating these technologies into a seamless experience for the user, managing the system inputs to determine the appropriate modalities and parameters to use.

The data collected during a biometric authentication doesn’t necessarily need to be limited to security. Some biometrics can reveal more information about a person, for example ECG can give us heart health and stress data whereas facial recognition gives us basic emotional mapping which can feed into a wider IoT system – for example to create smart cities that can predict when and where people will be more stressed or tired due to external events and therefore may be more likely to be involved in an accident. There’s a wealth of information and data coming from the human body that we’re beginning to collect, and machine learning and AI are the tools we can use to ensure we’re getting the full benefit. Your car, your phone or your watch can help you live a longer and healthier life.