COVID-19 has exposed several weaknesses in our society, for example, travelling and tourism are major sources to catalyze the spread of dangerous viruses. Healthy Travel is a project financed by Business Finland where we bring together three different industries including biomedicine and diagnostics, cruise & ferry and travel & tourism, and shipbuilding companies in order to develop and pilot new concepts for ensuring safe travel, minimizing the risk of viral infection through personal contacts and through contact with food, common surfaces, and through lodging arrangements.

The current global pandemic has a direct and extensive impact on Finland and affects negatively on its globally strong shipbuilding cluster. Therefore, we will establish new governance and organizational platform by combining three strong and existing but separate and complementary ecosystems into an integral “Healthy Travel”- ecosystem. The ecosystem focuses on identifying and piloting of new technologies (including advanced imaging, different sensing systems, protein and genome-based detection), innovations, workflows, and digital analytics to be implemented in the cruise industry by analyzing in- and outflow of passengers and identifying potential sources of pathogens for mitigating the spread of diseases during travel.