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Infant-ID: Fingerprints for Global Good
Insights
Infant-Prints, a low-cost fingerprint system, accurately identifies infants for vital vaccinations and nutritional supplements. This technology combats infant mortality in developing nations by ensuring proper tracking of essential healthcare interventions.
Area of Science:
- Biometrics
- Public Health
- Pediatrics
Background:
- Infant mortality remains high in developing countries due to vaccine-preventable diseases and malnutrition.
- Lack of identification hinders tracking of infant vaccinations and nutritional supplement delivery.
- Accurate infant identification is crucial for timely healthcare interventions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce Infant-Prints, a novel, low-cost infant fingerprint recognition system.
- To evaluate the accuracy and reliability of Infant-Prints for infant identification over time.
- To enable effective tracking of infant healthcare interventions, including vaccinations and nutritional supplements.
Main Methods:
- Development of a custom, compact, low-cost (85 USD), high-resolution (1,900 ppi) infant fingerprint reader.
- Implementation of a high-resolution infant fingerprint matcher.
- Collection of a longitudinal infant fingerprint database from 315 infants over 12 months in India.
Main Results:
- Demonstrated accurate and reliable recognition of infants over a 12-month period.
- Achieved a True Acceptance Rate (TAR) of 95.2% at a False Acceptance Rate (FAR) of 1.0% for infants aged 8-16 weeks at enrollment, authenticated 3 months later.
- Validated the system's efficacy for infants enrolled between 2-3 months of age.
Conclusions:
- Infant-Prints provides a viable solution for accurate infant identification in resource-limited settings.
- The system facilitates timely delivery of critical healthcare and nutritional support to infants.
- This technology has the potential to significantly reduce infant suffering and mortality globally.
Abstract:
In many of the least developed and developing countries, a multitude of infants continue to suffer and die from vaccine-preventable diseases and malnutrition. Lamentably, the lack of official identification documentation makes it exceedingly difficult to track which infants have been vaccinated and which infants have received nutritional supplements. Answering these questions could prevent this infant suffering and premature death around the world. To that end, we propose Infant-Prints, an end-to-end, low-cost, infant fingerprint recognition system. Infant-Prints is comprised of our (i) custom built, compact, low-cost (85 USD), high-resolution (1,900 ppi), ergonomic fingerprint reader, and (ii) high-resolution infant fingerprint matcher. To evaluate the efficacy of Infant-Prints, we collected a longitudinal infant fingerprint database captured in 4 different sessions over a 12-month time span (December 2018 to January 2020), from 315 infants at the Saran Ashram Hospital, a charitable hospital in Dayalbagh, Agra, India. Our experimental results demonstrate, for the first time, that Infant-Prints can deliver accurate and reliable recognition (over time) of infants enrolled between the ages of 2-3 months, in time for effective delivery of vaccinations, healthcare, and nutritional supplements (TAR=95.2% @ FAR = 1.0% for infants aged 8-16 weeks at enrollment and authenticated 3 months later).
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