Post-Pandemic Biometric Challenges and Solutions: A Shocker to Supply Chain

1. Introduction

The COVID19 (Pandey, D. et al., 2021) pandemic has imposed several challenges to mankind, among them one being biometric for attendance of working community and the related demand and supply chain related to biometric companies, developers, investors and customers. Due to many medical constraints, people are now reluctant to use contact based biometric systems. With the increase in personal and social hygiene so as to avoid transmission of pathogens via contact, people try to avoid usage of finger print, facial and voice based biometrics. Further, if the system is not active then multiple times of access contacts may be necessary (B. Muniandi et al., 2019). This aspect has to be restricted for avoidance of future pandemic situations. Hence with the imposed challenges, arrival of new solutions through renewed opportunities and research are explored. The exploration as a set of new solutions many ways to biometrics were developed such as periocular recognition or non-constrained iris, touchless fingerprint and vein based authentication, face recognition system via a group through video capture, etc. Further the new approach is to utilize the biometrics itself for disease detection with integrated thermal and infrared sensors is used. The location updates are availed from IoT (Pandey, J. K. et al.,2022) approaches where the global positioning system integrated devices are developed. Hybrid biometric devices with multiple ways of biometric in a single device arealso developed. So the higher priority will be for the design and development of biometric devices with the related inventory manufacture and distribution. As the new technologies are invented, further the cost of manufacturing and distribution increases, affecting the supply chain. This chapter details the various challenges imposed due to COVID19 pandemic (Lelisho, M. E. et al.,2023) and the solutions devised as an alternative to them with applicable pros and cons. Also this details the entire framework of design to end-user including the demand and supply aspects.

The COVID19 (Menon, V. et al., 2022) pandemic has imposed several challenges to mankind due to very dangerous life threateningvirus spread across the world. This has changed the dynamics of life in every possible way. Several problems were faced by living people like inequalities based on gender, ethnic races, economy, etc (Neelima K, C Subhas, 2022). There were other areas that are also severely affected like world economy, industriesespecially manufacturing, transport, distribution, medical field, tourism (Saxena, A. et al.,2021), etc. The world as a whole looks upon new ways of touchless biometrics/ scanners everywhere for record of presence and digital payments.

The most affected area is the working environment which had shifted from offices to home. During work hours, the tracking of employee to assigned work has been a major challenge. Even after pandemic, when the working environment has shifted to office, still people are accepting adherence to pandemic time protocols for safety. This has revolutionized the biometric systems in an unexpected manner. The focus is to avoid gathering to as to avoid potential transmission of viruses. This further imposes conditions like hand and device hygiene.

The biometric systems that aim at automatic identity verification of authenticated individuals based on their biological or physical traits. Many systems have to maintain a database (Babu, S. Z. D. et al.,2022) inherently and update as the new authentic individuals add up in the organisation. These details can never be lost so as to enable authentication. The biometric systems do find applications in offices (V.M. Patel, et al, 2016) for identity management (S. Mondal and P. Bours, 2017), forensics for post accident culprit identification (M. Tistarelli and C. Champod. 2017), surveillance for social and welfare management (M. Tistarelli and C. Champod. 2009), etc.