STAY IN TOUCH

from Essential Install March 2021

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STAYING IN TOUCH

Graham Oliver, Director of Jung UK, which also supplies the Siedle/E-Key brands into the UK, looks at how the nature of biometric control is shaping what security can do and how it matches consumer trends.

As well as the obvious functionality of controlling access to an area, the first things of note that biometric control delivers are convenience and personalisation. In a world where many aspirational homeowners are increasingly considering the ‘smart home’ an essential and desirable part of their daily lives, more convenience and more personalisation is important. More specifically, the growth in voice activation is a clear indication that users want and enjoy automation responses that are personal to them. For example, using their voice via Alexa or Google Home, to control lights, heating and security has been a major growth area that simply was not part of the industry’s offering a few years ago.

Users can tell their system where they are going, and it will setup the Sat Nav, ventilate and unlock the car while it is in the garage, all creating a feeling of luxury and personalisation. The same phenomenon can be seen in choices made for security systems.

Biometric readers, essentially speaking, just enable functions to happen, glorified switches really, nothing too personal there - but when linked to automation platforms such as Control4, Crestron and KNX, a whole matrix and combination of capabilities becomes available, making the systems feel very personal to the user or family. This is a key driver in the sales of these types of products, yes you want it do its job efficiently, but this is where security also becomes more ‘fun’, ‘cool’ or ‘desirable’.

Most people will have seen sophisticated biometrics in movies going back years, now they can do very similar things in their own home and they want to.

There are also great convenient and practical elements to integrating biometric control to a system. People loose or misplace keys often, hands and fingers are much harder to loose. It is also relatively easy for those up to no good to copy keys. This is true for homes and commercial spaces equally, disgruntled employees or thieves could obtain keys in some other way and use them at a later date. There are other reasons why people do not want to take big bunches of keys with them, going for a run? Keys are always a pain, spending time in the garden by the pool and want to keep the home secure? Again keys are a pain.

Increasingly security systems not only deliver the basic function of preventing access, but they also bring a lot more to the automation party. Products from the Siedle and E-Key ranges, like many others these days, can be linked to home automation systems. So as well as opening an area up, a pleasing and personalised macro sequence can be triggered.

Imagine this scenario; a biometric fingerprint reader is fitted to a swimming pool area, this delivers keyless access for convenience, but only to adults, the pool maintenance team can gain access at the right time and the main lights come on to enable work to be done. However when the owner of the pool is detected, the pool cover retracts, the lights dim or change colour and music starting playing. A security system which is fun and feels very personal, is always going to have a sales edge. An extra level of functionality can be triggered by using different fingers, for example, alerting distress or more simply triggering a different scenario, back to our pool scenario again, it can be party time, or serious swim time.

With systems like E-Key or Siedle you can go further. With biometrics delivering control of the access, the system also knows who is home and who is not, adding to the level of security, but again adding automation possibilities. Who is home can control where lights are on, where blinds activate or where heating is turned on. What these systems can trigger is only limited by the imagination of the integrator and what will benefit the customer.

Extra security features of systems like these include information gathering or automated sequences (should an authorised person try to gain access via a biometric reader). For example, an attempted unauthorised attempt could trigger the garden lighting and store a camera image from the door camera in an archive.

So, convenience, personalisation and automation means the modern security system has so much more to offer.

Biometrics introduce extra security and a fun element to home automation