'Borders must be secured with contactless body temperature screening solutions'

Pakistan needs to secure borders with contactless body temperature fast screening solutions to safeguard $351 million worth travel and tourism industry.

In this regard, the details have been released by MISHAL - a country partner institute of the New Economy and Societies Platforms, World Economic Forum (WEF) and Wusool, a company focused on digital solutions here on Friday.

According to the joint statement of both organisations, the strategic preparedness and response plan to fight the COVID-19 has left most of the public policy decision makers in a fix between the availability of resources versus technological solutions available to them.

This challenge becomes more significant for countries such as Pakistan, when the population and influx points are in greater numbers. The WEF in its biennial Global Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2019, ranked Pakistan at 121 among 140 economies globally.

The travel and tourism industry contribute 2.8 percent of Pakistan's GDP. The country attracts 965,500 tourists annually, generating an income of $351.6 million annually for the country.

On average, a single tourist spends around $364.2 per visit. Additionally, 6.8 million people travel by air to visit Pakistan per annum. The travel and tourism industry generate 1,484,200 jobs in Pakistan, contributing 2.4 percent share of the total employment in the country.

Pakistan is the least competitive country in south Asia, when it comes to travel and tourism, including the region's least favourable safety and security conditions, where Pakistan ranks 134.

Without a proper state-of-the-art solution, that can monitor travellers with the state-of-art artificial intelligence and other touchless technologies, Pakistan can lose its attractiveness to cater to international and national travellers.

It said that Pakistan's major international airports, Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, along with other international airports situated in Peshawar, Multan, Sialkot, Faisalabad, Quetta, Rahim Yar Khan, Turbat, Gwadar and DG Khan are entry/exit points for 6.8 million international travellers.

These can prove to be serious vulnerability points for any endemic or pandemic to spread in Pakistan and beyond. Pakistan also shares borders with its neighbours at multiple points, which are, with India (Wagah and Kartarpura), also the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus is also an entry/exit point available for locals.

Pakistan has eight formal border crossings with Afghanistan, of which Torkham and Chaman - Spin Boldak have international status.

The other six, assumed, are bilateral: Arandu (Chitral), Gursal (Bajaur), Nawa Pass (Mohmand), Kharlachi (Kurram), Ghulam Khan (North Waziristan), Angoor Adda (South Waziristan), and Chaman (Balochistan). These entry/exit points and have no efficient system to monitor the influx of travellers daily.

The volume of passengers is so huge, accounting to hundreds of thousands of people crossing the borders daily, makes the task humanly impossible to be achieved.

The COVID-19 has made the global travel and tourism industry vulnerable to a great catastrophe, and Pakistan is no different than the rest of the world, with limited resources and large populations to be monitored and checked, is a serious task for any administration.

Wusool, a company focused on digital solutions and payments has brought the non-contact body temperature fast screening solutions to Pakistan. The solution has been developed by CP Plus and distributed by Ethos Technologies.

Ethos Technologies has appointed Wusool as the authorised resellers for the state-of-the-art technology in Pakistan. Mohsin Iqbal, co-founder, Wusool said, "the recent COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the population to an unprecedented challenge, this can be addressed by social distancing and by identifying and separating the infected from the rest.

The infrared body temperature fast screening solution is mainly developed based on the principle of infrared thermal radiation. It uses a non-refrigerated core and low signal-noise image processing technology."

He further elaborated that, "What Pakistan needs is a non-contact, real-time, continuous and accurate temperature measuring equipment."

He said, "the border controlling authorities can benefit from Wusool's solution by non-contact monitoring, yet at the same time, a dedicated software system can be used to visually display the temperature information of the temperature measurement objects.

It can be used for entry-exit health quarantine at customs, airports, stations, terminals, land ports, and epidemic prevention in key places such as schools, hospitals, office buildings and etc."

Imtiaz Ghani, general manager for Ethos Technologies, West Asia, said, "for a long time, thermal solutions such as thermal cameras and imagers have been used for surveillance. The technology offered by Ethos has additional temperature-based screening and access control applications, which have gained more importance nowadays with the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19."

Ghani explained, "these solutions have proven helpful during past outbreaks of diseases such as SARS, the bird flu, the swine flu and Ebola. Now, thermal solutions have come to light again in the wake of COVID-19, which as of 15th April has infected over two million worldwide and killed 129,000.

Countries have imposed restrictions on travellers from the more affected regions, and thermal solutions are needed more than ever at end user organizations to detect the temperatures of individuals."

Pakistan opened its online visa system for the citizens of 175 countries. Moreover, citizens from 50 countries are eligible to apply for visa on arrival under tourist category and the citizens from 95 countries are eligible to apply for visa on arrival under business category.

Making the task to monitor and manage the viral infectious diseases on borders a challenging proposition for the border control and health officials. The technology proposed by Wusool, gives the perfect solution to guard borders and influx points for any virus or infection intrusion into the country.

The CP-Plus technology gives, accurate face tracking with results in real time, it has a temperature accuracy up to 0.3°C. The state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) system has the face recognition algorithm to accurately locate the temperature to target.

It can complete 16 target temperature measurements within 30ms at a distance of 3-5 meters. The system is so advance that it can capture human face in normal visible light, while the thermal imaging can monitor body temperature.