Launch of Testra – A Blockchain-based Medical Asset App

The COVID19 crisis has hit everyone very hard. The effects have been very serious for a lot of countries. Mauritius was at the centre of a second wave of covid infections and this happened while Mauritius had closed its borders with other countries. This shows that the current measures are sometimes not enough to properly manage this exceptional situation. As a Mauritian blockchain company, we needed to find the right solution that would help everyone in this pandemic to better manage their health assets. The result was Testra, a privacy-focused, blockchain-based health and covid management system.

Testra tries to solve many problems but it focuses a lot on privacy of data for its users. Coupled with the blockchain technology, it provides an immutable record of private covid-related information that can be used to improve mobility and help businesses provide a safer environment, not only for its employees, but also for their clients. In this context, Testra becomes particularly important for hotels and restaurants which deal with customers on a day-to-day basis. As such, it is of paramount importance that they have the right health protocols to ensure the security of everyone. Testra allows businesses to set up their own health protocols based on their use case. A business may have different use cases, including enforcing a different set of rules for their internal usage and another set of rules for dealing with their customers. As such, Testra provides this flexibility to businesses to set up their own rules, with as much flexibility as is needed.

We need to remember that the current situation is unheard of and flexibility is something that needs to be applied in different scenarios. Rules which are too strict can make life difficult for everyone involved. As such, Testra provides flexibility as a feature when defining the rules.

Another important feature of Testra is its privacy-focused design where all user medical data is stored privately on the users’ smartphone. At no point is the data stored on any third-party including Testra’s server. This is a deliberate and important design decision that we made when this project started. Horizon Africa and Testra values the privacy of all its users and as such, ensures that these sensitive data are always in the hands of the users and the only way this data is shared is via the express interaction of the user.

Our vision for Testra is to have it as an additional tool to fight the Covid crisis as effectively as possible. What we don’t want to happen is to have a situation where we are not able to manage the pandemic. This would be the worst case scenario and Testra is here to avoid this scenario.