Immunity and eDocuments for Safe Mobility

After strict restrictions and travel restraints in the past months, we have started seeing a careful resumption of work and mobility. With an invisible contagion, precautions such as distancing and masks are still vital. While normal life cautiously resumes for some, the travel industry is also starting its engines. Thus, additional precautions come into play, keeping a tight control on any potential spread, and two options are now being closely considered. Health Status certificates and vaccination passports will confirm the status of individuals as safe to travel or to enter protected areas such as the workplace, large venues, restaurants and concerts.

Securing the Personal

A secure way for people to document their vaccination or immunity status (presented when needed for cross-border travel) provides a possible solution for safe resumption of work and mobility. Limiting further spread while allowing for the travel of healthy people means the most secure protection of this personal ‘status’ data. As these documents won’t require novel technology they can simply be added to the existing travel documents already in use.

Health Verification

Let’s say you’re working in healthcare, and need to show your updated status regularly, for access to sensitive areas in a hospital. Your status, confirmed in a test lab, can be either held in a secure element and loaded onto a card, badge, sticker or smartphone with an NXP eSE, DESFIRE or SMARTMX IC embedded in, or securely accessible from a database, thanks to NXP NTAG. This information can be verified by an app or reader at the point of entry, with personal data managed securely.

Cleared for Travel

If you are travelling abroad, a SMARTMX can be used to supplement the information. Once your COVID19 status is confirmed by a lab, this data (name, date of birth, test date, validity date, status) can be loaded onto an eSticker, which will be affixed to your passport booklet and used at passport control according to International Civil Aviation Organization standards. Another solution is to load the same information onto a dedicated card, edited and released for the COVID19 pandemic.

Maximum Protection

Since we live in a mobile world, there is also the possibility to bring status data into our smartphones. This can be loaded securely onto a SN100 Family solution, which combines NFC and a secure element to ensure maximum protection against data manipulation, loss or theft. To cover all use cases for systems that require management by a central organization, the NFC tag located in a card opens secured access to a database. This database can enable health statuses to be reported and updated in real time.

Secure, Smart, Safe

With all these options already proven successful in their ability to protect and transfer data securely, NXP is showing its readiness to help the world’s authorities in making them available. While nothing is yet certain when it comes to a vaccine or the longevity of antibodies, we remain fully committed to bringing all the power of our technological solutions to helping secure connections for a smarter and safer world.