Scanning fingerprints from Android phone scanner

[Saad]

Hi,

I want ODK to scan fingerprints. If I get the android phone with built-in scanner (a lot are available nowadays), is it possible to use that and pick-up/pull biometrics of the survey respondents in the field inside the ODK app?

Thanks,
Saad

[danbjoseph]

Hi @Saad, I realize this is not exactly what you are asking (as it describes using an external fingerprint scanner) but did you see this post?

ODK Fingerprints & Biometrics framework

Collecting biometric data is pretty cool and has lots of potential for applications in ODK. One of those is to link data across time. This is a brief presentation of work done by our team at LSHTM with @seadowg, @dr_michaelmarks and others, to make a system for capturing fingerprints during ODK data collection with ODK Collect. The primary motivation here was to be able to do successive waves of data collection in the field and then later (at the desk) to check (using fingerprint data) that da…

[chrissyhroberts]

Hi @Saad

I think that all mobile phone companies lock users out of any way to capture a fingerprint via the built in scanner. As far as I know, this is because it would be fairly easy for bad people to steal biometric data for payments frauds, identity theft etc.

To the best of my knowledge there's no way to do what you want, except to connect a bluetooth or USB scanner to your phone. The functions we created that @danbjoseph linked above are designed to work with a low cost scanner that you plug in via USB. Please do note the stuff in my previous post that shows how you really need to capture multiple fingerprints in order to make this work with sufficient accuracy to do the kind of things you'd need fingerprints for, like linking records across time etc.