Voice Biometrics Technologies and Applications for Healthcare: an overview

Our medical information is perhaps considered the most personal and valuable of all. On the other hand, the rapid increase in the digitization of the healthcare industry nowadays is giving the patient identification and electronic medical record maintenance a key role to improve patient safety, protect against medical identity theft, enhance patient satisfaction, not to mention financial performances. Regulatory pressures and compliance guidelines naturally require health care providers to handle patient information with the highest degree of privacy and care. In this scenario, innovative healthcare organizations are increasingly using biometric technologies to support smoother and safer patient access and information sharing to improve security. Biometric identifiers are measurable unique characteristics of an individual physiological (such as fingerprints, iris, retina, DNA) or behavioural (such as typing rhythm, voice, and gait) traits that can be used to positively identify a person. Among them, voice biometrics is actually a convenient and secure method of authenticating a speaker's identity using just a few words, which has many advantages over other forms of biometric identification especially in the healthcare sector. After briefly discussing the impact of biometric technologies from a general point of view, the present paper focuses on voice biometrics, to give a technical understanding of how it works according to the current state of art and the forthcoming progress, and how it can be successfully integrated in the healthcare systems.