Infant-Prints: Fingerprints for Reducing Infant Mortality
This addresses the critical issue of infant identification for delivering vaccinations and supplements in developing countries, representing a novel application but incremental in fingerprint technology.
The paper tackles the problem of infant mortality in developing countries due to vaccine-preventable diseases and malnutrition by proposing Infant-Prints, a system for infant fingerprint recognition, achieving a True Acceptance Rate of 90% at a False Acceptance Rate of 0.1% for infants older than 8 weeks.
In developing countries around the world, a multitude of infants continue to suffer and die from vaccine-preventable diseases, and malnutrition. Lamentably, the lack of any official identification documentation makes it exceedingly difficult to prevent these infant deaths. To solve this global crisis, we propose Infant-Prints which is comprised of (i) a custom, compact, low-cost (85 USD), high-resolution (1,900 ppi) fingerprint reader, (ii) a high-resolution fingerprint matcher, and (iii) a mobile application for search and verification for the infant fingerprint. Using Infant-Prints, we have collected a longitudinal database of infant fingerprints and demonstrate its ability to perform accurate and reliable recognition of infants enrolled at the ages 0-3 months, in time for effective delivery of critical vaccinations and nutritional supplements (TAR=90% @ FAR = 0.1% for infants older than 8 weeks).