When employees interact with a Vein Scanner, there are a number of physical and environmental factors that can cause an unrecognised or bad scan. These factors will result in the vein scanner not being able to read the employee’s finger vein pattern accurately for registration or pattern matching.
The scanner is shining a near-infrared LED light through your finger to highlight the vein pattern. This pattern is captured by a very sensitive camera and matched to the pattern stored against your employee record.
Factors which can affect scanning
- Jewellery: If the employee has jewellery on their finger or surrounding fingers this can cause issues with the position of your finger as well as the piece of jewellery interfering with the scanning process.
- Nails: Varying nail length can cause the positioning of your finger to change within the scanner cradle. It is important to ensure that the employee’s finger is in the cradle correctly and not being affected by the nail position.
- Cuts and abrasions: Minor cuts and abrasions should not affect the scanning process. However, if there is any interference with the vein or excessive bandage cover on the finger this will then impact the ability to gain an accurate scan.
- Dirt: If the scanner glass is dirty or obscured, the unit will not be able to get an accurate vein pattern scan which could result in unrecognised scans due to sample quality. The scanner glass should be cleaned regularly by following the instructions outlined later in this article.
- Excessive direct light exposure: Direct exposure of the scanner glass to a large amount of fluorescent light/sunlight can interrupt the final pattern scan produced by the unit, or cause it to scan when there is no finger present in the unit. If other factors have been corrected, the unit can be tested in a darker environment or with a hood over the scanner providing shade to directly check this.
Best practice for an accurate scan
To ensure you get the most accurate scan, we recommend that your employees follow the below steps:
- Ensure your finger is clean and dry.
- Stand directly in front of the Kiosk/Vein Scanner.
- Keep your finger straight and level while resting your finger on both the cradles at the front and rear of the scanner.
- Ensure there is a gap between the bottom of your finger and the base of the vein scanner, do not touch the glass panel inside the device.
Best practice for cleaning the Vein Scanner
We recommend cleaning the vein scanner regularly by following our recommended procedure outlined in the below Help article: