Here's How to Think About the Danish Mask Study

 Medpage  November 18, 2020 

I was drawn to science and medicine because of all human endeavors, ours is one where smart people can say, "I don't know." We don't stop there. We run a study or experiment that helps us know more. That is what makes what we do different than other human endeavors.

I start then with a humility as I take on the Danish Mask Study, published on Wednesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. This is a 4,800-person randomized trial that took place in the spring and early summer in Denmark. The trial was run at a time where most Danes did not wear masks when they left their house. It told participants to practice social distancing and randomly assigned them with the advice to wear a mask (and even gave them 50 surgical masks), advising them to change it after every 8 hours of use, or gave them no advice to wear mask, and followed them to see how many acquired SARS-CoV-2 by PCR or antibody testing. The answer was a nearly identical proportion -- 42 of 2,393 people (1.8%) in the mask group and 53 of 2,470 (2.1%) in the no-mask group. The difference was not statistically significant.

A simple face scan will allow the system to retrieve the necessary billing information for a given transaction

Find Biometrics. December 9, 2019 

Denmark is once again the site of a pioneering trial of a biometric payments system, this time thanks to Nets, a European digital payments services provider.

The companies’ new pilot program will see participants making payments at a cafeteria via facial recognition. The trial will be undertaken at the Vibenshuset office complex in Copenhagen, and is open to up to a thousand participants who wish to make biometric payments at the Kokkenes Køkken’s cafeteria.

As with other so-called “naked payments” systems, the idea is to link customers’ payment accounts directly to their biometric identifiers. In this case, that means that a simple face scan will allow the system to retrieve the necessary billing information for a given transaction, and to process it, bypassing the need for the customer to present a physical payment card or any other hardware.

In a statement announcing the pilot program, Nets Head of Creation Labs Jesper Kildegaard Poulsen explained that its main aim is to gauge consumer sentiment about biometric payments. “Today, we have the technology to use faces as identification and validation when making a payment,” he said. “However, how people feel about having their faces scanned is still under question. This trial will help us to learn more about consumer attitudes to facial recognition payments.”

The trial will follow in the footsteps of a different naked payments program recently conducted by Nets in collaboration with Sthaler, whose Fingopay system was implemented at the Copenhagen Business School. That system, which is based on the scanning of finger vein patterns, saw an enthusiastic response from participants, prompting Nets and Sthaler to expand the deployment about a year ago.