Restoring Public Confidence on Safe Travels

This information was sourced from "Artificial Intelligence in Action: Selected ADB Initiatives in Asia and the Pacific," Asian Development Bank, 2024, https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/963831/artificial-intelligence-action-asia-pacific.pdf. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 IGO (CC BY 3.0 IGO).

New protocols needed to be put in place to restore the public’s trust in the safety of travel in 2021 following the global lockdowns that were put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This was particularly important for countries in Asia and the Pacific that heavily rely on tourism for income generation. In 2019, nearly 10% of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) came from travel and tourism.

Innovation is necessary to help the public feel safe from infection even while traveling. To this end, ADB, in collaboration with various stakeholders, opened the “Restoring Public Confidence on Safe Travels” challenge to encourage digital solutions in order to help regain people’s confidence in traveling. Investo Medika Asia’s proposed solution, MyHealth Diary, was selected out of 59 proposals. The app originally featured a database of various diseases and health-care facilities in Indonesia, but a new section on COVID-19 care was added in 2020. ADB supported the integration of the Health Passport feature, which was developed by the MyHealth Diary team in collaboration with several government institutions, including the Jakarta Provincial Health Department (Dinas Kesehatan DKI Jakarta) and the Jakarta City Transportation Council (Dewan Transportasi Kota Jakarta).

The Health Passport feature was intended to support efforts to track, trace, and monitor health conditions and inform users if they are safe to travel. The app was also intended to help users determine whether they were showing early symptoms so they could determine if they needed to get help. This feature was intended to help free up medical facilities, which were already overburdened with handling COVID-19 cases.

AI enabled the app to determine whether the user is safe to travel based on certain health indicators, e.g., temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen, and blood pressure. These indicators could be automatically collected by the wearables or manually entered on the app. Thresholds were set per indicator based on medical standards to inform users whether they fell within the normal range, which was also shown on the app, or if their health condition may put them and/or other travelers at risk of getting sick. The app used the data to categorize users into one of three statuses: green for low risk/minimum risk, yellow for moderate risk, and red for high risk of health issues.

Daily data were also collected and visualized through a chart to enable users to track whether their health, through the indicators, has changed over several days.

The MyHealth Diary team secured a supplier that was able to meet its requirements, which included 100 wearables that were intended to be synchronized with the app for users to easily monitor their daily health data. Meanwhile, the app development included ensuring that the data from the wearables can be synced to smartphones. The wearables were then distributed to app users who expressed interest in taking part in the testing. They provided feedback to the MyHealth Diary team on the wearables’ performance. The application was also designed to prompt users to confirm and adjust the data in case of false detection, or when potential errors with the data were detected. Additionally, a feedback mechanism was also integrated to support the flagging of errors.

Users were also able to book and receive results of reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) or antigen tests using the application. They had the option to use the test results as supporting documentation to complement the health passport data. Other features of the COVID-19 care service included online booking for an RT-PCR test, ordering of medicine, and information on health facilities in Jakarta. Uploaded vaccination certificates on the app were accepted as supporting documents for entering public places. In effect, the Health Passport feature of MyHealth Diary served as a travel document for users within and outside the region. In total, users received 100 wearables, but there were transfers of device ownership, leading to 150 individuals testing the Health Passport feature. with wearables. Meanwhile, 470 individuals used the Health Passport feature without wearables.

The MyHealth Diary team partnered with institutions to promote their app, which was designed with a scanner feature to scan the quick response codes generated by the app to determine who would be allowed to enter based on their health status. The app was launched in Jakarta on 3 April 2021 through a drive-through COVID-19 vaccination activity at Jakarta International Equestrian Park. The event also served as an opportunity for the team to promote the app. The MyHealth Diary team used social media and tapped its existing network for promotion.