Pictures of the Future Spring 2008
Digital Assistants – Facts and Forecasts
Electronic Safety and Security Assistants are on the March
Safety technology should warn people of dangers or prevent hazards from occurring in the first place. Here, the trend is clearly toward electronic, digital safety solutions. These include automatic intrusion sensors and video monitoring systems, fire alarm systems for early detection of fire and smoke, and access control systems that require biometric characteristics as input. Increasingly, alarm messages, voice and video are also digitally recorded, saved, analyzed and exchanged in a network.
Demand is booming worldwide. Market researchers at the Freedonia Group predict that the market for safety electronics will increase by almost 51 % from €26.5 billion in 2005 to about €40 billion in 2010. In India alone, annual growth of over 25 % is expected. In Brazil, security conditions have caused the market to grow at high rates for years; in 2006 alone, growth was 14 %.
Growth is also picking up in Europe, where the market for safety technology is likely to receive a boost from the harmonization of standards and a massive funding program. By 2013, the European Union is expected to make over €2.1 billion available for the development of new safety technologies.
Individual fields within the safety electronics market have different rates of growth. For example, the market for fire detection and suppression is being boosted from technological advances and new laws. According to a 2005 study by Frost & Sullivan, sales in this field are expected to increase from €3.4 billion to about €3.9 billion in Europe between 2005 and 2010. The study predicts that the highest growth will be in fire alarm systems. This segment is expected to account for about 38.1 % of sales revenues of the market as a whole by 2010.
An analysis from IMS Research shows that there has been a boom in digital monitoring systems in recent years. A study completed in 2007 concludes that the transition from analog cameras to network-based video monitoring systems is already taking place in the market.
These systems, which have their own IP address and an integrated Web server, require only a network connection to transmit images. According to IMS Research, the global market for network-based cameras will grow at an annual rate of about 53 % from 2007 to 2012. By 2009, sales will exceed €1 billion worldwide. "But even at this high growth rate, network-based cameras will account for only a third of all cameras involved in safety applications in 2010," says Simon Harris, director of studies at IMS Research.
Access control systems are also experiencing strong growth. Sales in this segment will likely grow from €3.5 billion to almost €4.4 billion globally from 2007 to 2010, according to an analysis conducted by Frost & Sullivan in 2005. In this segment, one of the major developments will be the transition from numerical codes or magnetic-strip card systems to smart cards or biometric solutions. For example, the global market volume for chip-based sensors for fingerprint identification is expected to grow from €90 million in 2006 to €1.3 billion in 2013. The market for iris identification will increase from almost €23 million in 2007 to ten times that amount in 2013. For high-security applications, new solutions like voice recognition and the identification of hand vein patterns will also appear on the market.
Sylvia Trage