ABI Research IoT webinar delves into “forced evolution” of biometrics market

The sudden emphasis on remote access, people-screening and face masks is creating a forced evolution in the biometrics market, according to a webinar from ABI Research on the changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic on the IoT ecosystem.

“After COVID-19: What Will Drive the IoT Market through 2020?” is presented by a team of analysts from ABI Research. The webinar, part of the firm’s Digital Tech Summit, covers IoT supply chain and connecting infrastructure, security and blockchain, biometrics and surveillance, and how enterprises should view their monetization strategies from an IoT perspective.

The webinar begins be touching on key indicators of the market’s shift, including IATA’s expectation of a 15 percent drop in cargo traffic during 2020, Microsoft Azure’s 775 percent traffic increase during the work from home period, and Instacart’s plan to hire 300,000 “full service” contractors. Key themes for enterprises post-COVID-19 are identified as resilience, visibility, flexibility and agility for scalability, trust, and speed and accessibility.

Increased motivation for digital payments is examined, as is the need to crack down on fraud of various kind during the global pandemic response.

Dimitrios Pavlakis presents the analysis of biometrics, who notes that increasing use of secure network access and privilege management is creating new monetization options and subscription models for multi-factor authentication (MFA) vendors. The increased use of contactless technologies, particularly face and iris biometrics, will receive further investment for on-site logical and physical access, civil and welfare services, and border control. The consumer electronics market is expected to be the one safe haven for fingerprint vendors, but there could be opportunities for biometrics in telemedicine and COVID-19 symptom-tracking applications.

Critically, Pavlakis says, “The entire biometrics market is currently undergoing a forced evolution, rather than an organic one, and with artificial intelligence firms spearheading the charge.”

The adaptation of machine learning systems to identify individuals wearing masks or protective gear.

In the long-term, higher investments in temperature screening, behavioral biometrics, and surveillance tools are expected. The use of biometrics and real-time data analytics in smart city deployments is expected to set up innovation across the entire IoT ecosystem, for things like outbreak prediction. Inevitably, however, this leads to a collision between data sharing and privacy regulations.

Biometrics was identified by Research and Markets as one of 30 industries seeing a surge in demand from the pandemic.

Article Topics

access management  |  artificial intelligence  |  biometrics  |  contactless biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  IoT  |  iris recognition  |  multi-factor authentication  |  screening  |  smart cities