The doors and their locks are one of the main lines of defense of our homes against external threats. They limit the entry of unauthorized personnel and keep us safe, both for ourselves and for our possessions.
Little by little technology has become fixed in these critical elements of the home, and in recent years we are witnessing the beginning of a revolution if it is more important than the one that produced the invention of the first metal keys. Why? What can technology do for your doors, locks, keys and access control? Let’s see it.
Any safe home that claims to be it must have, in addition to an updated alarm system, a good, reliable and robust door that is capable of preventing the entry of unwanted individuals. This is the lock, whose access control is the metal key we all know.
It is an active system, provided that we do not lose the keys or that they do not fall into the hands of unknowns since then the whole system is useless. Although there are technologies that can help us never to lose the keys, to have them always under control and well located avoiding that they fall into the wrong hands, the final solution goes through new ways of controlling access regardless of the traditional analog keys.
Two main trends are currently developing: Digital Locks for Doors and the use of a third device, the smartphone, as a key to access the home and as an identity manager for its inhabitants.
Biometrics: your body is the best key!
Each human body is special and different from the others, a feature that can be used to implement various systems of identification and personalized authentication with a high degree of security.
In the domestic sphere and outside the spy movies, one of the systems that are having more acceptances is the one related to the fingerprints and their almost infinite patterns of furrows and bifurcations. This is to increase the security will be complemented in the future with sensors able to detect factors such as temperature, conductivity, dielectric constant, blood pressure or heart rate.
In a short time, it will be usual that we have at home fingerprint recognition systems that we can easily install in an external frame of the wall, in the door, or even in the handle itself or crank. The identification will be quick and can be programmed to detect the family members or friends we want.
In addition to Fingerprint Access Control System, in the coming years, we will assist in the implementation of new identification methods that, combined with each other, will allow even more reliable authentication of the inhabitants of the home.
For example, among those who could be more successful, we find those who use the human iris as a unique and personal identification map, but also retina scanners, facial recognition and even voice recognition, which is increasingly accepted in computer and telephone systems.