EMBERS: EpheMeral biometrically enhanced real-time location System

In nuclear facilities, having efficient accountability of critical assets, personnel locations, and activities is essential for productive, safe, and secure operations. Such accountability tracked through standard manual procedures is highly inefficient and prone to human error. The ability to actively and autonomously monitor both personnel and critical assets can significantly enhance security and safety operations while removing significant levels of human reliability issues and reducing insider threat concerns. A Real-Time Location System (RTLS) encompasses several technologies that use wireless signals to determine the precise location of tagged critical assets or personnel. RTLS systems include tags that either transmit or receive signals at regular intervals, location sensors/beacons that receive/transmit signals, and a location appliance that collects and correlates the data. Combined with ephemeral biometrics (EB) to validate the live-state of a user, an ephemeral biometrically-enhanced RTLS (EMBERS) can eliminate time-consuming manual searches and audits by providing precise location data. If critical assets or people leave a defined secured area, EMBERS can automatically trigger an alert and function as an access control mechanism and/or ingress/egress monitoring tool. Three different EMBERS application scenarios for safety and security have been analyzed and the heuristic results of this study are outlined in this paper along with areas of technological improvements and innovations that can be made if EMBERS is to be used as safety and security tool.