The increasing need for security in present day society has generated considerable interest in the use of biometrics. Biometrics, which refers to identifying an individual based on his or her physiological or behavioral characteristics, has the capability to reliably distinguish between an authorized person and an imposter. A biometric system can be operated in two modes: verification mode and identification mode. A biometric system operating in the verification mode either accepts or rejects a user's claimed identity while a biometric system operating in the identification mode establishes the identity of the user without any claimed identity information.

A proper identity verification system for newborns is a requisite in today's world. The various crimes against newborns like illegal adoptions (intentionally, accidentally), missing, swapping and child trafficking are on the rise. MaIKidS a fusion of two words, Mai (mother in Marathi) and Kids, uses biometrics to prevent such acts by using the footprint trait of the newborn. The authenticity is further enhanced, by using multimodal biometrics i.e. the mother fingerprint for verifying the identity of the newborn. Hence, newborn footprint and mother fingerprint are used for identification and verification respectively.

With MaIKidS, the ink and paper method is replaced by a digital source and computers are used for processing and storage. The digital source is a high-resolution scanner specifically designed for MaIKids. The use of electronic processing results in higher speed, computationally efficient, reliability, accuracy, more robust, easy storage and retrieval. The identified newborn, is further verified by the fingerprint of the mother using effective minutiae matching algorithm; using the same high-resolution scanner.