At Danish gyms, face recognition technology checks your COVID-19 certificate (and your mood?)

Facial recognition technology has been deployed in 30 fitness centres all over Denmark in order to check whether customers have a valid COVID-19 certificate.

Originally conceived by Danish AI company Justface to check whether visitors cheat on membership payments, the system allegedly scans some 36,000 data points for each face, and is also "able to determine mood, gender, age and ethnicity".

In order to enter a gym, members now "have to register their valid corona passport and upload a portrait photo in the app-based solution", writes ComputerWorld. The system then checks both membership and COVID-19 certificate data, "and if a passport is missing, the staff at the center is notified which of the guests they may reject for that reason".

The system, writes Digi, had already been applied in the banking sector to automatically verify information about new customers, and facial recognition-based solutions by Justface are "also in use in restaurants, the automotive industry, the healthcare industry and the financial sector".

The company now aims at expanding its current version to the retail sector, and will trial its COVID-19 certificate function in 50 Danish chain stores after the summer.

Denmark is one the early adopters of vaccine certificates in Europe, and started developing its own solution in January 2021. Its "Coronapas" has had its first trial in April and, according to the Guardian, it "currently only allows users to access non-essential businesses such as hairdressers, beauty salons and driving schools", but has also expanded "to include museums, theatres, cinemas and restaurants" since 6 May.