It may be soon that there won’t be security officers greeting as the entrance of condos and taking down our particulars as part of their security clearance procedures. Technology will take care of that.
Glendale Park condominium, located in Hillview, has a new system implemented. A speaker has been positioned at the entrance of the condominium, through which a security guard from the remote command centre in Ubi will converse with the driver.
The vehicle’s licence plate number is recorded and the driver’s face is taken by a surveillance camera.
Once this information has been verified, the gantry is lifted, and the driver can proceed in.
The local security firm, Focus Security, and its sister company Asiatact, have spent the past five years creating this remote visitor-logging system. This system is currently in place at four condominiums here.
The security industry is starting to find ways of reducing manpower needs and investing more in the use of technology. This in efforts for reducing the dependence on manpower to carry out tasks.
Such a system is ideal for combining the use of manpower and technology together to achieve the most efficient outcomes.
At present, the security industry has more than 35,500 active resident security officers. Ever since the Manpower Ministry rolled out the Progressive Wage Model for security officers this year, this has presented companies in this industry with rising manpower costs.
It is estimated that the basic pay for security officers is set to increase by around $300 by 2021, with an annual increment of at least 3 percent in the three years after 2021.
As a result, businesses are turning to technology to reduce the hours and human strength spent in manual logging and paperwork. It realigns the work of security officers as well, allowing them to focus on duties such as patrolling and responding quickly to incidents.
Similar efforts have been in the making within Singapore’s defence industry.
The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) announced, on 4 December, of a new face and iris scanning system at a designated automated lane at Changi Terminal 4.
With this new feature, passport and thumbprint scans will not be required. This allows for a “contactless” and seamless process for clearing immigration.
This reduces obstacles faced in the traditional method of fingerprint scanning such as verification issues as a result of faded fingerprints due to ageing, dryness or scarring said the authority.
Singaporeans who are six years of age and above and are holding a passport issued after Jan 1, 2018, with IDs beginning with the letter K, are eligible to use this new system.
This is because these citizens have their biometric information already saved onto the national database and hence no prior sign-up is needed.
This new immigration clearance procedure is undergoing a six-month trial, which started on November 25.
It was observed that this contactless process allowed for faster clearance, few seconds quicker than the current process.
At the contactless lane, a traveller will have to walk through two gantries. The first gantry requires the individual to stand on a footprint mat. A scanning machine will show the animated instructions that will capture images of the iris and face.
Upon the opening of that gantry, the next one will feature another machine that will confirm the identity of the individual based on the information produced by the scans before the gantry opens.
