IHF Roundup: Body Odor as the New Lie Detector, Biometrics Invade Classrooms and Hospitals, and Other Top Headlines This Week

I've written a bunch about how facial recognition and fingerprinting are changing the face of biometric technologies on this blog -- but body odor as a new biometric identifier? Hadn't quite thought of that one. This week, DHS announced plans to study how body odor can be used to identity individuals (just like fingerprints). Looking forward to seeing how this innovation plays out...

The world of biometrics is receiving attention outside of law enforcement and in classrooms and hospitals, too. Earlier this week, I wrote a couple of posts on the use of facial recognition technology to take attendance in UK classrooms as well as biometric technologies popping up in hospitals nationwide. Who knows where they'll pop up next. I've got a feeling that I do.

Not only are biometrics taking shape in areas typically unaccustomed to these technologies, but the robotics world is expanding to other areas -- including Japanese classrooms and tomato farms. Saya, a robotic teacher, can express six different emotions, call roll and even smile at students. While developers say she's no replacement for human instructors, they hope it to be a solution for the growing labor shortage.

MIT, on the other hand, is developing robots not for the classroom, but rather for the greenhouse. The robots are part of a larger plant monitoring system and are able to water the tomato plants and dispense food when needed. Not only do these gardeners offer more exact feeding habits, but also a more economic gardening solution for massive farming grounds. As this CNET article reports, the researchers envision a fully automatic greenhouse going forward with robots running the operations entirely. They bring a new meaning to the term "green thumb".

Video surveillance standards have also been in the spotlight this week -- SecurityInfoWatch's Geoff Kohl hosted a roundtable on the push for standardization not only in the US, but worldwide and what that will mean for end-users, integrators and product manufacturers. The Open Network Video Interface Forum (ONVIF), in particular, kicked off in Germany earlier this year and this week announced 18 new member companies that have joined the group. Exciting to see these finally taking shape and thrilled to see what comes out on the other end.

Finally, great post from @ShawnF on the growing use of Twitter in the security industry. Check out the post here -- or even better, follow me @TheSteveRussell on Twitter!