A High-Tech Array of Travel Tools: ‘Smart’ Health Cards,Temperature-Reading Glasses and More

Three weeks into Israel’s lockdown to help prevent the spread of coronavirus, Rafi Kaminer decided to get creative with his cabin fever.

The chief executive of Pangea Group, an Israeli company that builds infrastructure for biometric identification and digital analytics, Mr. Kaminer was used to flying abroad several times a month. But with global air traffic reduced to a trickle and borders sealed across continents, Mr. Kaminer found himself housebound — and itching for a solution. He began brainstorming with his brother, Assaf Kaminer, an executive vice president at Pangea, and the two came up with an idea: To get people flying again, invent a streamlined method of determining that a traveler is free of Covid-19, resulting in a document that could be presented at any airport in the world, encrypted for security and customized for the unique testing regulations of each port of entry.

So, tapping their co-workers and the power of artificial intelligence, a Pangea team worked to invent it themselves.

The travel industry is well acquainted with artificial intelligence: customer service chatbots, predictive search engines and automated check-in services like self-service bag drops are becoming de rigueur. But with coronavirus now ravaging the industry, programmers and digital designers are seeing an opportunity to innovate.