School Lunch Biometrics

By now many school headteachers and administrators have probably heard of school lunch biometrics, or the use of such devices such as fingerprint readers to recognise students and allow for the automated payment and accounting of school lunch purchases. Some may be wondering how to sort the promise from the hype, the information from the misinformation.

While school lunch biometrics can legitimately address a host of problems from slow lunch lines, lost lunch money, cumbersome payment, lunch fraud and bullying, the devil is in the details. Of course, it all comes down to the bottom line: labour, cost efficiency, and return on investment (ROI).

School lunch biometric systems work by students placing a forefinger on a small fingertip reader by the cash register. In seconds, the VeriCool system translates the electronic print into a mathematical pattern, discards the fingerprint image, and matches the pattern to the student's meal account information.

A numerically-based system, all fingerprint images scanned by the VeriCool recognition software are discarded, and cannot be used for any purpose other than recognising a student within a registered group of students.

Since there's no stored fingerprint image, the data is useless to law enforcement, and as there's no way for any fingerprint or computer expert to extract a record and reconstruct a person's fingerprint image from purely numerical data, privacy is protected.

A biometric lunch system is quicker than PIN-based systems and magnetic card-based systems, and lunch lines are guaranteed to be sped up where cash is primarly used. However, the most significant amount of time to be saved is at the administrative end.

Because accounts are prepaid and students can never lose their finger for identification, it eliminates a number of time-consuming administrative problems such as lost lunch money, lunch money bullying, card replacement, or account fraud caused by stolen cards, overheard PIN numbers, or other cases of identity theft.

Moreover, because the VeriCool biometric system automates the payment and accounting of school lunches, it eliminates tedious backend administrative chores such as cash, ticket, or paper-based handling, accounting, reconciling, and oversight.

Having the capability of being linked to an attendance monitoring system, the VeriCool biometric lunch system easily strides ahead of the competition, and is being installed in schools across the UK.