Romanian tech firms develop biometric technology to prevent students from cheating in online exams

Tremend, one of the most dynamic Romanian tech companies, has launched a platform that allows examination centers, assessment providers, and universities to supervise students taking remote exams and prevent cheating. The solution, called observed, leverages AI-enabled typing biometrics, a proprietary technology of Romanian startup TypingDNA, a behavioral-biometrics SaaS company offering innovative typing-based authentication.

The global market of proctoring and online exams has skyrocketed in recent months, mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the education institutions to close their doors for students.

"We've already seen an acceleration of digitization in medicine, commerce, and education, due to the challenges in the past period and rethinking of business processes. We're always paying attention to the market trends, and we're using innovative technologies to develop products that bring value to the market. We've developed observED leveraging TypingDNA's typing biometrics technology to help the universities and educational facilities adopt modern technologies that would enable them to extend their educational footprint and offer more opportunities to students worldwide," said Alexandru Paraschiv, Director of the Innovation Department at Tremend.

"Tremend's observeED will propel the use of typing biometrics authentication in the education industry, as an alternative to face-to-face proctoring, which is no longer feasible in today's challenging times. We hope that more online learning providers will facilitate the continuity of education for students of all backgrounds by leveraging the wide-accessibility of typing biometrics authentication, which works with just a keyboard and minimal bandwidth internet connection," added Tudor Goicea, Chief Revenue Officer at TypingDNA.

According to Tremend, the observED app is a digital instrument that successfully replaces a supervisor during a written exam, being integrated into the Moodle plugin. Moodle is one of the most popular open-source systems for managing the learning process (LMS - Learning Management System), featuring over 100 million users all across the globe. This LMS is backed by a strong community of partners and is continually adapted to the most stringent learning requirements.

This solution addresses the needs of colleges, universities, eLearning platforms, examination centers, assessment providers, and other service providers that need a fully digital approach towards both the learning mechanism and the examination process.

The observED app integrates high-end technologies for validating the user's identity. The onboarding is done by scanning the identity document's security elements, using the webcam of the device on which the exam is taken.

By using keystroke events, mobile sensory data, and proprietary Artificial Intelligence algorithms developed by TypingDNA, observED application captures users' unique typing pattern, establishing a user-behavior biometric profile for each of them.