Nonprofit iRespond creates biometric ID technology with Azure

Imagine, for a moment, you leave your home country with the hope of earning a living wage on a fishing boat. You arrive and receive a temporary work permit, which your ship’s captain confiscates—until you’ve managed to pay off your debts, he explains. You then work 18-hour days, and instead of going back to port, you’re transferred from boat to boat, never setting foot on land. You do not complain. You’ve heard rumors of other workers being thrown overboard for making trouble.

This scenario isn’t fiction; it was reality for thousands of migrants working in Thai fishing ports, according to extensive research from Human Rights Watch and other investigative organizations. Recently, though, the nonprofit iRespond partnered with the Thai government to help stem the rising tide of abuses in the fishing industry via biometric identification technology.

Thai officials have registered nearly 170,000 migrant fishermen with iRespond’s iris-scanning technology, giving previously invisible individuals the fundamental right of identity. Once they receive an ID number linked to their encrypted iris scan, the system, based on Microsoft Azure, is better able to determine when that person enters and leaves port. 

“Our system is giving the Thai government a fighting chance to verify that a person who goes out, comes back,” says Eric Rasmussen, President and Chairman of iRespond. 

For the more than 1 billion people worldwide who do not have any formal identification, iRespond’s technology can bring them out of the shadows.

One identification, wherever you go

The World Bank estimates that at least 1 billion people worldwide have no form of recognized identification. Their uncertain status poses a problem for both at-risk individuals and organizations that want to provide services. 

A lack of identification makes exploitation, human trafficking, and slavery easier to perpetrate. What’s more, creating multiple solutions to track IDs—such as platforms that vary from hospital to hospital but don’t communicate—can cause a lapse in care or delays in lifesaving humanitarian aid.

“When you understand who someone is, you understand what they’re entitled to, whether that’s national citizenship, international refugee support, or simply food distributions,” Rasmussen says. So he and colleagues delved into the realm of biometric identification, a way of documenting someone’s identity that is less likely to be transferred, lost, or taken away. After research, they learned that among the roughly 16 ways to identify someone according to a unique physical trait (such as fingerprints or earlobe geometry), iris scans were the most reliable except for DNA: one biometric comparison study for the UK’s National Health Service found zero errors after 2 million scans.

After securing a user’s consent, the iRespond team uses a patented camera to take a near-infrared photo of their iris. That circular image is then unrolled and sampled (much like analog-to-digital music sampling), unique features are extracted and written to a file, then the file is encrypted, and a random 12-digit number is assigned to that file. That number becomes an anonymous identity. A tiny,16-kilobyte file with this information is uploaded to the Azure cloud platform. The iRespond technology is designed so that another scan of the person’s irises—the encryption key—is required to unlock the records connected to the identity. 

In this way, a nonprofit or social services agency can access continuous records for highly mobile populations that may have lost their documentation in a natural disaster or never had any to begin with. With only a tablet, a handheld iris scanner, and a weak internet signal, humanitarian organizations can link at-risk individuals to a single-truth identity.

At any time, anyone can opt out of the iRespond system and deactivate all their data. “Privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality are crucial to everyone using our system,” says iRespond CEO Scott Reid.

Providing continuous service in difficult conditions

Humanitarian organizations work on the frontlines of crises, serving people who may not carry medical records or even keep track of their birth date, who may speak a different language or dialect than caregivers, or who may pose as someone else to get services. The potential for miscommunication, misdiagnosis, errors in identity, fraud, and gaps in aid is high.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is one institution that relies on iRespond technology to correctly identify healthcare research participants while safeguarding anonymity.

The university studies outcomes of particularly marginalized people who are living with HIV in South Africa using the iRespond solution as a tool to support engagement in HIV care and retention in the study. “We need to be 100 percent sure that we are indeed providing the intervention of our study to the correct person,” says Carly Comins, MPH, senior research program manager of the Siyaphambili study in Durban, South Africa. That way, researchers are more confident that the women they are engaging with are, indeed, study participants. “We can say we’re doing that with confidence because the ID generated from the iris scans are unique and can’t be duplicated.”

Typically in South Africa, people need a clinic card to get treatment for HIV. Yet some—especially vulnerable groups like sex workers—don’t have one, whether it was stolen, lost, or inaccessible when accessing services. Confidential and anonymous systems underlying biometric identification help solve this problem. Comins says, “When we’ve conducted focus group discussions with study participants around biometrics, women have mentioned that they prefer biometric solutions to generate an ID, saying, ‘I know I’ll always be able to get my treatment because my ID is a part of me.’” 

Anonymity and privacy help protect those at risk

In some parts of the world, a person’s gender, ethnicity, nationality, medical status, sexual orientation, religion, or another factor can put them at risk. “Anonymity ought to be something identity can provide—recognizing you are entitled to care but not identify you in ways that can put you at risk,” Rasmussen says. “iRespond provides that.”

In Southeast Asia, Population Services International/Myanmar works with vulnerable groups to minimize health risks and treat those who are living with HIV. “Yet if we kept large amounts of personal information, we’d risk being raided by the police or other governmental agencies, because some of those we serve may be engaged in activity considered to be illegal by the authorities,” says Daniel Crapper, Deputy Country Representative at PSI/Myanmar. “If we collected traceable data, we could put our clients at risk.”

That is why PSI/Myanmar has rolled out the iRespond solution across its 22 clinics. Now that the nonprofit uses iRespond’s biometric data to identify clients, many of whom move frequently, clients don’t have to give their names, addresses, or other personal information to receive services. 

The data clients do provide is more secure, too. The iRespond solution uses encrypted feature extractions and destroys the original biometric image once an ID has been assigned. The human iris is unique from every other iris, helping ensure this identity cannot be duplicated, corrupted, or forged. The iRespond Azure cloud database is designed to use anonymized information, so those running social services or staff at iRespond are less likely to access anything tied to an actual person. Iris scans are the only way to unlock an encrypted identity, meaning beneficiaries must be present to access their information when receiving services.

Even if bad actors managed to get past the world-class security of the Azure cloud and then break through the blockchain encryption of every file, they would find it difficult to find personally identifiable information that they could mis-use.

“They could print out every bit and byte on every file on our servers, and they wouldn’t get anything tied to a single human,” Rasmussen explains.

Accessing highly secure storage from anywhere

Just as refugees and internally displaced people are often on the move, the organizations that serve them must be nimble. iRespond’s biometric identification technology allows aid workers, researchers, and healthcare providers to do their jobs virtually anywhere, under almost any conditions. No matter if a client was last seen in a refugee camp in Angola or the border outside Myanmar, they are able to request and receive services wherever they travel. 

“Our organization couldn’t exist without the cloud,” says Reid. Microsoft Philanthropies supports the nonprofit’s critical work with a USD60,000 Azure grant, allowing iRespond to channel maximum resources to enable a digital identity for even more people.

The files linked to an iris scan are so small, roughly one-sixth the size of a single-paged Word document, that users need only the faintest of internet signals to upload to the cloud. And in conditions where internet access is spotty or nonexistent, workers can continue offline and sync to the cloud once they connect to a strong signal. 

Microsoft has also donated 39 Surface Pro tablets to iRespond to enable flexibility in the field. “We find that the Surface devices pack a lot of computing power into a very small package, can be easily transported to where they are needed, and are simple and intuitive to use,” says Larry Dohrs, iRespond’s Vice President for the Asia-Pacific.

What’s more, the iRespond system is platform-agnostic. That means that an organization using any platform or software can incorporate the solution. With an increasingly expanding network of hospitals, social service hubs, academic institutions, ports, and refugee camps using iRespond technology, previously undocumented people will receive even more seamless care.

“The number of people we have helped has rapidly gone from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, and we look forward to soon working on behalf of many millions of people,” Dohrs says. “These Microsoft tools are helping to make it possible.”

Collecting better data to improve services

An identification number tied to biometric data reduces the risk of creating duplicate entries for the same person. The Siyaphambili study in South Africa, for example, has an ongoing enrollment at both a clinic drop-in center and in the community: They are continually entering new participants into the 18-month randomized trial, and iRespond’s solution virtually eliminates the possibility of duplicating records or enrolling the same person several times. Iris scans also help prevent human errors that may occur when manually entering identification numbers, thanks to the ability to scan and print the unique ID barcode. 

“Utilizing iris scanning to identify participants allows us to ensure we accurately identify who is a participant, which intervention she is assigned to, and where she is at in the timeline within the study,” Comins explains. 

The accuracy results in more reliable results for the Johns Hopkins study, which is investigating the minimum package of services needed to suppress the HIV virus. 

Similarly, PSI/Myanmar just conducted a review of its data that tracks demographics and the timing of positive HIV tests. By analyzing these details, “we uncover which groups are most vulnerable to becoming infected,” Crapper says.

Staff working in clinics used to have a general hunch about these trends, but without hard data, program specialists were hard-pressed to make any adjustments. 

“This technology is helping us design better, more targeted interventions,” Crapper adds. “Now we are using data and evidence to redirect resources to where they are absolutely most needed.”

At the end of the day, the iRespond solution is empowering organizations to better serve the world’s most vulnerable groups.

“No one knows, officially, that hundreds of millions of people exist in the world so they live at constant risk of being mistreated—abused, exploited, or enslaved. Gaining a biometric identity, something that’s intrinsically part of you and can’t be lost, and yet that contains nothing that can compromise you by divulging more than is required—that can be life changing,” Rasmussen says. “The formal recognition that you exist in the world is a critical first step.”