AI at the edge: Digital ID helping healthcare reach everyone

In a remote rural village, a health worker wades through piles of papers trying to find the records for a mother and baby with no medical ID. Without this crucial reference, treatment may not be possible. It’s an all-too-common scene because globally 850 million people lack any form of official ID—nearly half of them children whose births have not been registered. With medical IDs linked to official IDs, a quarter of adults without identification find it harder to access healthcare; for vulnerable babies and children this can be critical.

Even when medical IDs are issued, traditionally these rely on papers that are easily lost, damaged, or poorly kept, while duplications and the misspelling of names create confusion. The lack of accurate medical IDs, a serious but often overlooked health issue, is contributing to global healthcare inequality.

A medical ID is something many of us take for granted. Its value is simple but significant: It helps ensure the right person gets the medical treatment they need, when they need it. Accurate medical IDs avoid confusion and misidentification; they provide vital and timely information on a patient’s health history, from blood type to allergies. They also identify what treatments patients have had, and what they might need—including essential vaccinations. This all reduces the danger of medical errors and omissions.

For healthcare professionals, medical IDs speed up and simplify their interactions with patients, letting them focus on action rather than admin. At a macro level, medical IDs support comprehensive data analysis to guide health spending locally, nationally, and globally, helping maximize the impact of stretched resources. This all makes medical IDs vital for the efficient delivery of effective healthcare and crucial to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal on global health and wellbeing: There is an urgent need for a simple, accurate, cost-effective way to identify patients and link them to their medical records—and for this to be digital.

In a rural Ghanaian village, we get a glimpse of this better future. A nurse uses a tablet to capture a high-quality image of a baby’s face that will form the basis of its biometric digital health ID throughout its childhood—with no paper to be filed or lost. For millions of children around the world, moments like this might determine whether they receive potentially lifesaving treatments or fall through the cracks of overburdened healthcare systems. Behind this solution is a tech company called Simprints.

Born a decade ago out of a hackathon sponsored by Arm, the UK-based compute platform company, Simprints set out to create a digital health ID that works anywhere. They initially developed a fingerprint-based biometric solution that proved successful for adults, however, children presented a tougher challenge as their features constantly change. And so SimprintsID was developed.

SimprintsID combines mobile devices, on-device AI, and secure data synchronization to create a system that is both powerful and practical. It works like this: In the field, health workers capture a baby’s key biometric data—their face, ears, and feet are the best markers at this age. In seconds, AI-powered software running on the device processes the data and identifies the highest-quality image—challenging with a wriggling baby! Crucially, this can even be done where connectivity is limited, and when network access becomes available, records are securely synchronized with central health information systems. The data is stored on the healthcare system, giving the child a digital medical ID. Then, as the child grows up, AI algorithms running in the cloud help map projected changes to the child’s features as they age, so the medical ID effectively “grows with them” over time.

At the heart of this solution is Arm-powered technology, providing the essential compute performance and power efficiency, a critical requirement in lower resource settings. Power-efficient computing allows advanced AI capabilities to run on smartphones and tablets, and with minimal energy consumption. This means batteries last longer, brings lower operational costs, and reduces reliance on unpredictable power and connectivity infrastructure—all essential factors in delivering healthcare at scale.

For medical IDs, this compute efficiency translates directly into positive health impacts. More accurate patient identification reduces costly and dangerous errors, duplications, and waste; better data enables smarter planning across everything from facilitating national programs to local clinics ordering exactly the right number of vaccines; and lower operating costs mean limited healthcare budgets can stretch further, helping reduce the overall cost of delivering healthcare while reaching even more people. In essence, efficiency at the compute level increases efficiency across the entire healthcare system.

As global populations grow, as healthcare demands increase, and as the world works toward equitable healthcare for all, the question is no longer whether technology can help, but how it can help everyone. Alongside the many celebrated technological advances, from portable ultrasounds to drone delivery of blood, digitalized medical IDs brings the understated but essential power for healthcare workers to treat every patient—turning digital medical identity into a force multiplier for health systems under pressure and a significant step toward global equality.

Simprints already serves four million people across 17 countries and is working to reach 20 million people by 2030—including a million infants. And it is not an isolated success story but can be seen as a model for how healthcare systems can leapfrog traditional barriers using intelligent, efficient technology to expand access while controlling costs. By enabling energy-efficient computing across billions of devices, Arm technology allows organizations to build solutions that are scalable, resilient, and practical in real-world conditions.

To find out more about the transformative power of Arm Compute, click here.