Decentralized digital identity to verify COVID-19 results

In April of this year, with the global pandemic impacting the lives of every person on the planet, I found my learnings from my Fides Health research applicable to verifying test results. In a society where fake data is worse than no data, I  assumed that there was a need for an unbiased system to verify test results. So I participated in the first MIT COVID-19 Challenge to collaborate broadly to find a solution.

During the 48 hours, together with an international team of experts, we pivoted Fides Health to create ImmunePass, a verification system for virus test results, through a decentralized network.. Safely encrypted, open-source, and verified on blockchain; we aimed to bring society back together, after many months spent apart. The hackathon team selected ImmunePass as one of the top ideas in our track. But my goal to bring an a-like system to the public did not stop there.

After the hackathon, we participated in various competitions. Along this process, I learned that having a digital emblem saying you are negative or positive, will raise many privacy and ethical issues. I decided to leave the prototype to research the issues. During this research, I was invited by the Dutch government to participate in a national tender for the Dutch contact-tracing application. I proposed to integrate an open-source solution like SafePaths. This led to being connected to the team, led by Ramesh Raskar from the MIT Media Lab, where I participated in the early days of the project on design and internationalisation level.