From body cams to subdermals – what’s next for wearable biometrics?

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner

Innovative technology becomes de rigueur quickly – for an example of how quickly, look at media coverage of police body cam images. Introduced in the UK in 2014 for police firearms officers following the shooting of Mark Duggan, body worn cameras (BWC) are now as commonplace in law enforcement as the radio or the Taser – so commonplace in fact that suspicions are raised when their data is not available for a controversial incident.

The use case for BWC has migrated rapidly to other public-facing roles like firefighters and emergency departments and is also on the increase in private security settings like retail. Reasons for the increased reliance on wearable tech in business and public services are largely pragmatic. Sounds and images can support a police investigation and prosecution, but their primary contribution is prevention. Basic security cameras aren’t preventing incidents – particularly in retail – and some of the UK’s most camera-intensive spaces have recorded the highest increases in volume crime. Knowing that you’re being individually filmed has a powerful influence on behaviour and research studies show how giving staff BWCs decreased the risk of assault, both for employees wearing them and co-workers in their vicinity, de-escalating aggression and violence. BWC can also help avoid or settle complaints about staff and researchers have found the cams give private security personnel “legitimacy by association” with police use of the same tech. Whether reported misuse by the police will have a blowback effect remains to be seen.

Personalisation of the technology is also part of the employee experience. Being issued with BWC signals personal investment in employees beyond blanket coverage of ‘workplace assets’, giving staff a feeling of prioritisation and protection. From a management perspective it offers mobile, at-the-scene capture of sounds and images while fixed cameras are the complete opposite: immobile and impersonal with little measured impact on incident prevention.

As ever, the technology has detractors and down sides. Without rehearsing them all, there’s a controversial technical feature shared by most BWC. Police officers or staff will often ask “what if I didn’t activate the record function in time to catch the beginning of an incident? That can be the most important.” Continuous buffering is the answer. Most BWC have a “pre-record” capability whereby the camera continuously captures data and retains it temporarily, allowing recovery of up to 2 minutes’ worth of footage. Even the best camera can’t (yet) turn back time but assurances that nothing will be lost means it is constantly capturing data, an always-on capability that worries some people.

At their current stage of evolution, body cams are half-way house between traditional security cameras and biometric solutions like facial recognition technology and we can be sure the evolutionary journey won’t end here. But we are also seeing the rapid accessorisation of biometric technology more widely. As Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, recently told the Augmented World Expo conference “The smartphone put our lives in our pockets. But augmented reality puts computing into the world where life actually happens”. Snaps Specs are the first smart glasses to operate as a standalone without needing a hook up to another device like a smartphone or watch. Their front-of-user display enables the wearer to browse, communicate, translate, and record.

Meta’s new release of the Ray-Ban Display and development of facial recognition for smart glasses ‘normalise ambient biometric surveillance’, further corroborating the growth in tech consumerism. Despite the risks of cross-breeding biometrics with standard image capture technology, multi-modal wearables are on the increase and incorporate biometric capabilities like voice recognition and pulse detection. The new Snap Specs may be attracting criticism for their bulk and weight, but big problems can also arise when devices get smaller, making them harder to detect and easier to use covertly. The molka craze in S Korea has shown what that looks like and we know from phones to drones how quickly devices can shed weight. Oura’s Ring 5 – width 6mm, thickness 2.23mm and weight 2g – with inbuilt AI Advisor chatbot will record your heart rate, blood oxygen, temperature and motion, tracking more than 50 different biometrics involved in sleep, readiness, stress, and resilience.

With demand for implantable electronic devices in medical monitoring and functional support increasing in line with global life expectancy, wearable devices of every size offer further potential for hacking and cyber disruption. Systems using wireless bi-directional exchange for device control and real-time biometric data acquisition with integrated sensors are particularly vulnerable to inference and unauthorised interception.

New challenges from wearable biometrics for businesses and public services include data storage, protocols for releasing or sharing images and systems integration, all of which are complex and time consuming. When used in public, wearable cameras and devices also become part of the surveillance infrastructure. If worn inside private spaces like our homes, by delivery drivers or maintenance workers or bailiffs, their effect is highly intrusive and their use should be much more closely regulated.

GoPro’s original POV wearable sports camera has now been incorporated into apparel for pets while their owners’ version is no longer just capturing images but sounds and speech, creating summaries of the wearer’s day and even drawing mind maps to reflect their interactions. These devices, described by Forbes as “ridiculously inexpensive” and always on give a glimpse of where personalised biometrics are going. Prepare for piercings, nail extensions and hair accessories to follow.

From a policing perspective, this is an elementally different biometric landscape from the one we have grown up in. Law enforcement will need to recognise cameras and other devices and will want to recover and interrogate them. They will expect us to share our readings and recordings where the data may be relevant to an investigation or emergency response and may even ask us to capture things for them. Are we prepared to wear that?

About the author

Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  body cam  |  Fraser Sampson  |  Meta glasses  |  mobile biometrics  |  research and development  |  smart glasses  |  wearables