A Scottish primary school has installed a biometric system that uses the unique position of the veins in the palm of the hand to allow children to buy their school meals.

The system, installed at Todholm Primary School in Paisley, maps the pupil’s vein patterns using a near-infrared beam to confirm their identity.

The technology is being used by all children that have school dinners, providing anonymity to those entitled to state-subsidised meals and removing the associated social stigma.

The biometric reader automatically deducts money from children’s accounts, which are topped up each month by parents or from subsidy funds.

Palm-vein biometric scanning was selected because it bypasses the data protection issues of using the children’s fingerprints, says Todholm Primary School headteacher Sandra Gibson.

‘This system gets around difficulties inherent in the use of fingerprint scanners, and the children really like it,’ she said.

‘We could eventually link it to an online payment system so that parents could regulate the children’s use of money at school completely.’

The system has been developed by Fujitsu Europe and Scottish technology company Yarg Biometrics. Gibson says the installation process has been simple, quick and effective.

Scottish deputy first minister Nicol Stephen says palm-vein biometric technology has potential well beyond school canteens and in the business sector.

‘Easy-to-use biometrics could be of value to large companies that want to protect their premises and employees, or to hotels that want to offer guests the benefits of keyless entry,’ he said.

But BCS biometrics expert Angela Sasse says systems such as palm-vein recognition will only become commonplace if they are quick and reliable.

‘A test using iris scanners at the Venerable Bede School in Sunderland proved to be very slow and the food was cold before the children got it, so it was eventually abandoned,’ she said.

The system at Venerable Bede was supposed to be able to process 12 pupils a minute, but managed only five.

‘If that happens here, people will return to using swipe cards and other systems for checking identities,’ said Sasse.

Ovum analyst Graham Titterington says speed is often the enemy of accuracy with biometrics.

‘Getting a reliable system at a reasonable cost with decent time to identify is the big challenge for biometrics systems at the moment,’ he said. ‘It is also the reason why it is taking so long for them to be developed.’

Any biometrics system used for a business would be dependent on access to company computer systems to check identities, and IT departments must be careful how they go about implementations, says Titterington.

‘The back-end system should be separate from front-end devices, with a standard interface to make it easy to change one scanning system for another if things go wrong,’ he said.

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Further Reading:

• Public warms to biometrics
• Biometric single sign-on software launched
• Public warms to biometric technology

Biometrics pros and cons ... in 30 seconds

• Voice prints can be used to make identifications over the phone. Institutions such as banks are looking at the technology to protect against fraud, but accuracy can be affected by illnesses such as colds, and by background noise.
• Facial recognition is the biometric of choice for all new UK passports. Facial features create a unique template and can be recognised from photos or videos, but the technology can be fooled by ageing faces and by coverings.
• Iris scanning is a fast and easy method of identification, but contact lenses and cataracts can distort readings, and some brown eyes have proved harder to scan than other colours.
• Fingerprints are regarded as one of the best developed of biometric recognition technologies, but some prints are not pronounced enough to be read, and can be affected by scarring and injury.