Elsewhere, Qantas is trialling a digital health passport on flights from Germany.
Researchers from the University of Queensland, the University of Melbourne, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States have jointly developed a virtual « virus » that could potentially be used to help more accurately assess the spread of COVID-19, and reduce the lag between people catching the disease and getting diagnosed. Dubbed as the Safe Blues program, the solution relies on Bluetooth technology to transmit virtual « virus-like » strands between mobile devices to mimic the spread of COVID-19 infections in the community in real-time. Relying on artificial intelligence, the Safe Blues infections are then compared to the latest real-world COVID-19 data. « Safe Blues offers a solution for real-time population-level estimates of an epidemic’s response to government directives and near-future projections, » the researchers stated. « Safe Blues strands are safe virtual ‘virus-like’ tokens that respond to social-distancing directives similarly to the actual virus. However, they are spread using Bluetooth and are measured online. « The relationship between strand counts and the progress of the actual epidemic can be determined using machine learning techniques applied to delayed measurements of the actual epidemic. This then allows real-time data on the Safe Blues tokens to be used for estimation of the epidemic’s current and near-future state. » The researchers said the protocols and techniques of the program have been developed into an experimental minimal viable product in the form of an app on Android devices with a server backend, much similar to existing contact tracing frameworks, such as one the Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing framework developed by Apple and Google.
