COVID-19 has been a real challenge for the Australian Antarctic
Program like it has been for everybody globally.
The key issue for us is to ensure that COVID-19 does not get into our Antarctic stations.
So the Biosticker is essentially a tiny little device like this. It goes onto
the skin and measures your heart rate your temperature, the number of times you cough
and with all these sort of numbers and values you're trying to detect whether you have early
signs of infection or not. If that gets detected then the polar medical unit gets notified
and then we'll send a doctor out to check up on the expeditioner to make sure they're okay.
I've quite enjoyed getting the reports on a daily basis that look at your respiratory rate,
your heart rate, your temperature. And one of the things that we don't normally get an insight into
is whether you sleep on the right side whether you sleep on your left side or
your back and you get a report every day and I quite enjoy looking at that.
All expeditions that were heading south this year are undergoing a
two-week pre-departure quarantine process accompanied with three COVID-19 pcr tests
and the idea behind this is to try and keep COVID-19 out of the Australian Antarctic Program
and ensure that we're keeping our expeditioners and the broader Australian Antarctic Program safe.
The trial has been currently undergoing for the 2021 and 2022 season so we've been running this
trial for the past two months and we'll be going on for another three four months
and after that we'll analyze and have a look at the results we've gotten and then think about
whether this is worthwhile as an endeavour for future seasons. This provides a really unique tool
in our battle to keep COVID-19 out of Antarctica but it's also well supported by a really solid
evidence base that demonstrates that this technology has been effective particularly
in overseas countries like the United States and we're really lucky to have the opportunity
to use this and utilise this within Australia and within the Australian Antarctic Program.