dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Halvdan Hoem Grelland <halvdan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

This seems like a seriously over-engineered and mismatched solution to me.
What do you expect to be the advantage of biometrics over name + some ID
number?

Biometrics are only really suitable for authentication of known
individuals, not identification. Meaning biometrics is good for proving
someone is who they say they are, but not for figuring out who they are in
the first place.

There are several reasons for this:

a) Accuracy of biometric matching is never perfect. There will always be
the possibility for false positives and/or false negatives. That is, there
is a very real chance of not finding a match or matching on the wrong
individual.

b) Finding an individual in a database through biometrics would mean
attempting to match on every single record, which quickly becomes very
expensive and in some (larger) cases computationally infeasible or very,
very slow.

c) Due to the two above points and more, such systems are incredibly
expensive to implement and maintain.

There are, as you mention, very serious security and privacy concerns with
such systems. Any sane implementation would keep biometrics in a separate
system anyways. An example of such a system is the Aadhaar project in
India, which does exactly that. It is controversial in it's own right,
however, seeing that biometrics are stored in a central database. That
said, reading up on it should give an indication of the complexities
involved with designing and running such a system, not to mention enrolling
individuals in a secure and efficient manner.

The good news: there is work underway in DHIS2 to implement a generic
solution for generating unique identification numbers. These could be given
to an individual upon registration to make him/her identifiable in the
system. This is really a solution to your exact problem, and would only
require tracked individuals to know their DHIS2 ID, which should be simple
enough.


On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 7:26 AM, Seid Hussein <seid.hisp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Here in Ethiopia we have Community Health Information Systems focusing on
> "family folders" whereby health services provided to members of families
> are registered and kept collectively in "folders". Despite being paper
> based, this system seems to be working well especially in the rural setting.
>
> While the families in rural areas are set and do not move much which makes
> tracking them easier, it looks to be much more difficult in an Urban and
> Pastoralist settings where members of the community move either by changing
> rental houses or looking for new pasture lands which makes tracking the
> people to deliver health services difficult.
>
> Since Ethiopia doesn't yet have a social security system or national
> identification, identifying each person has become much more difficult.
>
> Hence it has been suggested by various people at the ministry to employ
> bio-metric identification to track these people.
>
> However, DHIS2 currently doesn't seem to support bio-metric data. Is there
> any plan to do so in the future? I understand that there are privacy and
> security issues to consider but incorporating this feature will make it
> more complete.
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Seid,
>
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-- 
Halvdan Hoem Grelland
Software developer, DHIS 2
University of Oslo
http://www.dhis2.org <https://www.dhis2.org/>