Abstract

During the pandemic, the tourism industry was one of the most severely impacted sectors. As vaccines are now widely available, each government is working to develop a system that can generate a digital vaccine certificate and PCR lab test result to verify that a person has been fully vaccinated or has a negative PCR test result, in order to allow them to enter business premises, travel overseas or cross state borders. However, the use of centralised systems in the development of the digital COVID-19 pass system results in a number of challenges, including the system’s high susceptibility to failures, sluggish and inefficient information transmission, and vulnerability. The goal of this research is to offer a new digital COVID-19 pass based on the proposed “SmartHealthCard” blockchain technology. SmartHealthCard is a decentralised application (dApp) encrypting and hashing user data and safely storing it in a distributed database. Privacy preservation, GDPR compliance, self-sovereignty, KYC compliance and data integrity are featured. This initiative has the potential to benefit the public, healthcare professionals, service providers and the government. SmartHealthCard enables quick verification of tamper-proof COVID-19 tests/vaccines, aiding in COVID-19 transmission control while respecting the user’s right to privacy.