Passports please! How tech will help us beat the virus
It sounds like a great idea – a passport to prove vaccination. But we may need some good technology to make it foolproof.
Now that Australia’s vaccine program has moved from stroll-out to rollout, the next challenge is to ensure any passport system to prove inoculation is safe and secure.
We have the technology to do it, says Aaron Hornlimann, co-founder and chief executive of Melbourne-headquartered Elenium Automation, which before the pandemic was focused on designing and building systems for smoother airport check-ins and bag drops.
“Just like internet banking, a vaccine passport can be made secure,” Hornlimann says. “A solution which is authenticated, secure and can be integrated into other systems would make free passage much easier – whether it be getting to work, going on a holiday or visiting the gym.”
Hornlimann says privacy and the right for a person’s information to be distributed are a critical part of the puzzle to building a vaccine authentication system.
“Vaccine passports need to give the owner control over whether they wish to share the data and for how long,” he says.
“Think of it as a consent system. A user can choose to share their data with their employer or an airline but only give temporary access to others, such as a gym. It’s like a driver’s licence – a business can ask to see it and I can choose to show it, and I live with the consequence of my decision.”
Hornlimann says it needs to be agreed who will issue a vaccine certificate. Currently, vaccinated Australians can download a digital certificate through the Express Plus Medicare app and store a card in the wallet of their smartphone, but there are questions about its security and whether it is forgery proof.
Independent South Australian senator Rex Patrick suggested adding a QR code and made a forgery of his own vaccine certificate to prove his point.
“There is a complexity to having a standard QR code for a vaccine certificate,” Hornlimann warns. “Someone can easily take a picture of the QR code and copy it, so it needs to be more sophisticated. For example, the QR code should change every 24 hours, or at some practical interval, to limit the risk of abuse.”
Hornlimann says solving the vaccine passport questions is a prime opportunity for innovators.
“Australia has deep technical capability and we can lead the way and develop a permissions system,” he says. “With our big domestic travel market, we could develop a technology solution that works across our borders and get ahead of the squabbling in Europe and in the US. It would need to be a distributed system where there’s a source of truth.
“At the beginning we were all trying to grasp what to do, and we sandbagged it.
“Now we’re talking about permanent solutions that are going to protect us going forward. We can’t have our head in the sand and say it’s not going to happen again – investing in technology now is not a one-off just for Covid.”
Elenium executed what he refers to as a “partial pivot” to bundle airport check-ins, which doubtless will lead to their greatest hike in complexity since September 11.
“Airlines and airports have worked long and hard on making the check-in and boarding process faster,” Hornlimann says.
“You’re going to have to verify that you’re vaccinated, probably show you’ve had a PCR test, have your temperature checked and so on.”
In February, Elenium had the company’s HealthGate fever-detection kiosk certified by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, making it approved for use in the EU under a mutual-recognition agreement. It’s already being trialled to automate fever-screening check-ins for employees, visitors and customers by retailer Cotton On and logistics giant Linfox and its cash-moving company Armaguard.
As well as making operations efficient and compliant, Hornlimann says, automation quashes human error.
Quarantine, health orders and lockdowns work to slow Covid’s spread, but “simple human error can undo these things very quickly”, Hornlimann says.
“In a lot of these high-risk environments, such as airports and hotel quarantine, things are still being done by pen and paper, such as audit records and PPE checks.”
He’s frustrated by the propensity “to throw people at the problem”, rather than figuring out a way to deploy technology. Airports and events, for example, are packed with people who are there to ensure compliance.
“It puts more friction into the whole process and it could be done automatically,” Hornlimann says. To run an event, you’re getting everyone to scan a QR code, wait in line, scan their ticket, and have their temperature checked.
“That can be automated into one step: your ID gets checked through biometrics, which most of us already use to unlock our phones, the system records you for contact tracing, checks your temperature and admits you.”
It could enable a full plane to empty or an empty stadium to fill with just a few people monitoring these automatic checks, “rather than a barrier of people who are put at risk”.
A trial of the HealthGate system is being implemented by a major sporting code in Australia. There are benefits beyond the obvious from such swift passage.
“When you implement self-service automation, people have more time to spend money on drinks or food inside – so it reduces risk and it gives us the opportunity to recover economically,” he says.
Eighteen months into the pandemic, weariness and complacency mean compliance has been lapsing.
“One of the reasons airlines like technology such as our bag-drop solution is that if a passenger puts on a bag that’s overweight, they can’t argue with the machine,” Hornlimann says.
“They either pay for it or it doesn’t go, the machine doesn’t care. The business case for automation looks at that, versus a check-in agent who says, ‘Oh it’s only a few kilos over’ and lets it through. It’s human behaviour.”