Trueface, a leading computer vision technology company, and Bluestone Technology Ltd., a leading blockchain provider in the Caribbean, have joined forces to create a blockchain-powered missing persons database in the wake of Hurricane Dorian. The August hurricane devastated Grand Bahama Island and Abaco in The Bahamas, leaving the status of over 4,000 people on the islands as ‘unknown’, with relatives finding it increasingly difficult to track them down. FindMeBahamas aims to combine facial recognition technology with artificial intelligence to make finding and reuniting missing persons quicker and easier following natural disasters, with blockchain playing a crucial part.
A Life changing Solution
FindMeBahamas is a part of FindMeCaricom, a platform that includes The Bahamas and 27 other Caribbean countries that are typically at risk from weather events such as hurricanes. Using Trueface’s artificial intelligence, the platforms use facial recognition to match missing persons with those that have been found, assigning the latter a unique 6-digit ID number that will identify them on the Bluestone Network, a blockchain network aimed at social and financial inclusion in the Caribbean. Blueston’s co-founder and CEO John Bridgewater was spurred into combining the efforts of the two companies after his own grandmother could not be found in the wake of Hurricane Dorian, stating in a press release announcing FindMeBahamas about the benefits of such a system:
The partnership between Trueface and Bluestone is giving the Caribbean community a platform to find their family members, as well as providing e-identification numbers after many have lost traditional documentation in the storm.
Blockchain to the Rescue
Natural disasters, wars, and other large scale national events can easily cause critical documentation to be lost or destroyed, leaving individuals with no claims to their personal property, or even their identity. The benefit of a blockchain-based system is that this information, once collected, is instantly updated, secure, and cannot be tampered with. It is also recoverable remotely in the event of large scale devastation, a huge improvement over a standard in-house database. A blockchain-based emergency fund transfer system is already in use in the British Virgin Islands, which is also susceptible to hurricanes.
