In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations to rethink how they leverage security technology. While some end users were already in the process of migrating to solutions that offered remote management capabilities, the spread of the coronavirus hastened this shift for a multitude of businesses that were forced to reduce or outright eliminate staff populations in offices around the world.
Other capabilities that gained prominence at the height of the pandemic, such as touchless access, will also likely remain security mainstays for most organizations even after infections begin to eventually wane. One company that has been at the forefront of helping end users navigate the health and safety challenges presented by COVID-19 while simultaneously providing a next-generation access control solution is Invixium, whose IXM TITAN reader provides multi-modal biometric authentication for a variety of high security applications.
This week, the company announced the debut of its IXM Mobile platform, which will extend the capabilities provided by IXM TITAN and its enterprise-class software, IXM WEB, to a smartphone app. Among the features offered by IXM Mobile include remote face enrollment, digital card or QR code as contactless credentials, a custom attestation questionnaire, and vital signs screening.
According to Invixium President and CEO Shiraz Kapadia, the company saw adoption of facial recognition jump dramatically after the onset of the pandemic, which greatly influenced their product development plans in that they knew they needed to incorporate features to help organizations deal with the lingering effects of COVID-19.
“We had aspirations to have our own mobile app that would do basic access control and time tracking, but it wasn’t on our roadmap until 2022,” Kapadia explains. “But once we came out with [COVID-19] solutions around our TITAN product – the facial recognition product where we are doing body temperature screening, mask detection, and facial recognition while wearing a mask – we felt that it still didn’t complete the overall healthy access experience of an employee or a visitor because you are still asked to answer those attestation questions using a pen and paper and employers are expected to keep a record of it. QR codes were starting to come out, whether it is for vaccine confirmations or otherwise, and we said, ‘we need to do this, we need to expedite this and add some of these capabilities to a mobile app to complete the overall seamless employee/visitor experience.’”
Historically, Kapadia says one of the biggest pain points associated with deploying biometric access control measures has been the registration and/or enrollment that an organization must do for the biometric identifier chosen. However, the continued improvement of facial recognition algorithms combined with the increased processing power of smartphones means that the technology has reached a point where pre-enrollment can now be effectively achieved.
“To bring all the employees onsite, line them up – whether that be 10 employees, 1,000 employees or 5,000 employees – it usually takes months to register these employees because they have to come onsite. That was painful even prior the pandemic to do from a logistical and expense perspective, but in the pandemic to bring that many people together and line them up caused health issues and non-compliance with regulations surrounding social distancing and all that,” Kapadia adds. “The fact that it is not just a touchless experience on the identification/verification side, but even on the registration aspect of it as we are making it very seamless, I think businesses will like that.”
Complying with COVID-19 Regulations
Beyond offering pre-enrollment for facial recognition, another one of the features that the company is offering in its new app is the ability of end users to deliver QR codes or digital cards to employees or visitors directly on their smartphones. Though QR codes have traditionally been viewed as a vulnerability given the ability of someone to take a picture of it and share it, Kapadia says they have addressed this by changing the code dynamically every 20 to 25 seconds.
This works especially well for visitor management as organizations can send people QR codes digitally rather than issue temporary cards. In addition, Kapadia says it will also enable public and private sector organizations to enforce COVID-19 vaccine requirements as many governments are leveraging QR codes to create vaccine passports for citizens.
Even if infections continue to decline, Kapadia believes that many health and safety requirements globally will continue to be in place for the foreseeable future.
“A lot of how businesses react to the post-pandemic time will be driven by how governments open up borders, allowing travel and letting people visit different public and private areas,” Kapadia explains. “It is going to go up and down when waves hit. In places with high case numbers or low vaccination rates – which is about 75% of the world – the precautions are still going to be in place.”
In fact, some organizations are already thinking about how to mitigate against the next pandemic.
“When we see the statistics, pandemics used to occur once every 35 to 40 years. In the past 20 years, the statistics are showing an even scarier story where pandemics arise every six or seven years and the forecast from the WHO and CDC is that they are going to happen more frequently,” Kapadia continues. “Businesses that are responsible will want to continue screening employees and visitors at entrance points and not let their guard down. Over the next three or four years, until the world gets fully vaccinated against COVID-19, a lot of countries and regions are going to want to continue temperature screening, use touchless access control and biometrics, and not hand out a pen and paper to everyone who walks in to answer those [attestation] questions.”
IXM Mobile will be released on Oct. 28th and is free to download from the Apple App and Google Play stores. Organizations will need to purchase a license to enable each sub-app for its staff or visitors.
Joel Griffin is the Editor of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
