Biometric Security and Identification

As we discussed in the Finland EPR system an individual takes up 100 GB of data storage for one’s medical record. Comparing this to 250GB that a typical laptop computer manufactured in 2010 has, we see that one single person’s medical history entails a vast amount of information. Throughout the book we have looked at many aspects of health information, these include vital signs, images, records of each doctor visit, and medications taken; essentially everything related to health that begins from a person’s birth throughout their entire life. Such information gives a lot of details about an individual.

The vast range of information types make medical records extremely useful in many areas: marketing, government planning, and pathology analysis alike. Companies utilize plentiful resources to find out the state of individuals for the purpose of segmentation marketing. Although marketing is an important topic in promoting healthcare technology-related services, it is not within the scope of this text and readers are encouraged to read Hung (2009) for details.

Biometric refers to some form of physical characteristics measurement of the human body. Such a unique feature that belongs to an individual can be used for security and identification purposes. A person’s voice has been used for recognition for decades, not very conclusive, although speech recognition and filtering algorithms have improved notably over recent years. Although biometric security is used in many areas outside the medical domain, it is a topic that warrants noteworthy discussions owing to its popularity in different areas of healthcare and telemedicine related applications.

French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon was perhaps the first person who formally documented biometric identification. His pioneering work created anthropometry, a systematic biometric measurement for unique personal identification. Anthropometry is accomplished by some kind of measurements of certain body parts. The original anthropometrical system of identification consisted of three parts.