Hackers have never been better funded and baby boomers are aging, which creates a huge market for biometrics.
Fingerprints, eyes, vein structure, facial characteristics, voices and the way you walk can all be used as a unique password. Monitoring and observing health problems early can be key to keeping our population healthy.
For the bold, there may be some investment opportunities.
Health care game changers. Biometrics are expected to create a Renaissance in health care.
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“One of the biggest opportunities today is to invest in startups at the earliest stages of development before the VCs start paying attention to them,” says Unity Stoakes, president and co-founder of the StartUp Health network. “We’re seeing a wave of health innovation in areas like biometrics and mobile diagnostics because of the digital revolution in health care spurred on by global mobile adoption, proliferation of powerful sensors and investment in big data and analytics platforms.”
Health care attorney Harry Nelson works with digital health companies and early-stage biometric companies and sees “a lot of early-stage biometric companies that are still pre-IPO stages that are going to be coming on the market.” The co-founder and managing partner of Nelson Hardiman says with Fitbit’s (ticker: FIT) popularity, there has been a “move toward wearables” to monitor patients.
Quanttus is developing a device, similar to an Apple (AAPL) watch, which can monitor a patient’s blood pressure.
“Blood pressure is a really critical data point for a lot of medications for hypertension,” Nelson says.
It has a huge potential market since about a third of Americans (about 70 million) have high blood pressure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which greatly increases their risk of heart disease and stroke. A noninvasive accessory to monitor and reliably report high blood pressure, say, when you’re sitting at a computer, could be a “game changer,” Nelson says.
EarlySense provides continuous monitoring of patients, reporting when they are at risk of falls and bedsores. Nelson considers Early Sense a “promising company” in the biometric space.
EyeNetra tests for near- and farsightedness and other eye issues via a setup that looks similar to that of virtual reality — with a smart device snapping into a headset. “You can ensure that people have the right eye care — eyeglasses and contacts, that kind of thing. But I think it’s an interesting platform. It can become a broader diagnostic tool beyond just vision,” Nelson says.
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Abaa operates similarly to Alphabet’s Google Glass (GOOG, GOOGL), and is able to record what a doctor sees, and share it. It addresses a challenge for patients in rural areas who have limited access to specialists. “When a primary care doctor is visiting a patient, they can connect everything they see to a specialist,” Nelson says.
Banking security. You might have seen the technology in James Bond movies, but U.S. Bancorp (USB) is working with Samsung Electronics to develop its own technology that scans a customer’s iris to combat identity theft with a bio-password.
Dominic Venturo, executive vice president and chief innovation officer of U.S. Bank, says “later this year or early next year, we’ll be piloting [the iris scan technology]” and working with a team of about “30 people who do research and development and product pilots across a variety of our businesses.”
In 2014, Venturo was one of the early biometric users of Nuance Communication’s voice technology. The technology allows users to opt into using their voices as an authenticator for higher-risk transactions that may require an additional level of security. It creates a mathematical “hash” formula of a customer’s voice. That hash then becomes an unlock key for the account, said Venture. When the customer speaks, and it matches the hash, they get access.
Venturo says the technology doesn’t rely on a second or third party to authenticate, or, in essence, to have access to passwords. New fingerprint, voice and iris scan technology will work as an independent on-and-off switch for accounts, he says.
A venture capitalist’s warning. When investing in biometric technologies, Charlie O’Donnell, partner of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, warns of companies who share biometric data. “Biometrics for security are valuable only under limited circumstances,” he says. “They’re often painted as a cure-all, but they’re far from it.”
That’s because passwords in general are shared secrets, insofar as the user has her password and so does the server. The good news is that passwords can be changed and we don’t wear them on our bodies.
If biometric information is shared, it can become shared un-secrets: they aren’t necessarily a secret, since they can be captured by third parties pretty easily by lifting fingerprints, recording facial recognition data, eyeball scans, voice recognition — all of these things are observable to an attacker. Worse yet, unlike passwords, people can’t change biometric data. If biometric data is uploaded to the cloud and subsequently stolen, it’s game over.
“In that sense, biometrics are worse than passwords,” O’Donnell says.
“In general, any password system that is centrally stored is going to be vulnerable to being hacked,” he says. “Companies like SolidX are using the block chain to ensure that sensitive identity data is stored in such a way that eliminates this risk. When your identity information is stored on a distributed database like the block chain, it’s impossible for a system to fake being you because many servers across the world will maintain the authenticated record of who you actually are and what transactions you did.”
Apple’s localized fingerprint scanning technology on the iPhone “does have some good utility,” O’Donnell says, since the biometric data isn’t uploaded to the cloud. “Add an additional layer to the local authentication (pin code) and you’re in even better shape.”
Other burgeoning technologies are Nymi bracelets that identify a user by their heartbeat, BioClaim software that ensures that the correct patient is physically present (to eliminate phantom claims reimbursement), 3-D fingerprint scans that measure pores, and technology that identifies click patterns at a computer.
“It’s going to be hard to pick the winners,” Nelson says.
Biometric eye tracking can even help to determine how well students learn.
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“There’s a revolution going on in garages and labs around the world with thousands of entrepreneurs creating solutions for the future and the pace is only speeding up,” Stoakes says. “While we are still very early in this cycle of innovation, the time is now to start betting on the creators and technologies you believe in and want to see in the market yourself.”
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How to Invest in Biometrics originally appeared on usnews.com
