There will be 5.5 billion users of mobile and wearable biometric technology around the world by 2019, according to a new report from Goode Intelligence.

“We believe that smartphones and tablets will be the first wave of consumer devices to be biometrically enabled and this will quickly be followed by wearable technology,” says Alan Goode, author of Mobile & Wearable Biometric Authentication Market 2014-2019.

“We are very much at the beginning of another transformational aspect of authentication – the use of wearable technology for authentication purposes, in particular leveraging the next wave of biometric technology to create seamless, continuous authentication.

“What will be truly transformational about the use of biometrics on wearable devices is the birth of the universal authenticator – a device that intuitively knows who we are, where we are, what we want to do and can open doors – both physical and virtual.”