Darwin-based Universal Site Monitoring’s plan to help home quarantine

Home quarantine is an important part of the NT government’s plan to reopen borders once the Territory’s vaccination rate hits 80 per cent. But how will it work? Find out one local business’s plan.

HOME quarantine is an important part of the Territory government’s plan to reopen borders once the Territory’s vaccination rate hits 80 per cent, hopefully as soon as next month. But how will it work?

According to Emil Tastula, one of the founders of Darwin-based Universal Site Monitoring (USM), it’s ­simple as an app, a personal safety monitor, a sensor and a monitor.

With home quarantine a preferred option to time at Howard Springs quarantine centre, Mr Tastula said the technology his business was delivering to industry would neatly pivot to a role in a home detention environment.

The industrial requirements – particularly at mine sites and other heavy industrial operations – will be far more rigorous than home detention, but the ­biosecurity components of the technology such as heart rate and body temperature monitoring are ­easily portable into a home quarantine setting using our mobile phone App and software platform.

“Body temperature indication and heart-rate are both very critical pieces of biometric data to monitor proactively,” he said.

“If you’re seeing someone fatigued or head towards heat stress if you know that very quickly you can proactively ­intervene and get somebody to rest or take a break can be extremely valuable. A large percentage of lost time injuries and work incidents have root causes that revolve around people getting to a heat stress, dehydration, or an elevated fatigue level or reduction in ongoing fitness for task,” Mr Tastula said.

USM formed in 2011 during the period before the current surge in interest in global connected worker solutions in the industrial sector including petrochemicals, gas, mining, minerals processing. The business now has 15 full-time and three part-time staff and a growing list of customers interested in trialling and utilising the patented technology that’s tapping into the needs of businesses nationally and overseas.

The patented connected worker solution monitors, among other aspects, speed over ground, g-force events, carbon monoxide levels, hydrogen sulfide levels, levels of explosive gas in the atmosphere, ambient air temperature, ambient noise levels, oxygen level, altitude outdoors and indoors or underground and heart rate or core body temperature indication, as well as device status itself.

“Real-time connected worker solution is about connecting the worker as fast as possible with the safety supervision, the process safety co-ordination people who to this day sit at control centres on most sites.

“What happens every day is they issue work permits, make sure the processes are healthy and where it should be, production levels are correct, machines operating safely and we’ve now added the technology to those facilities globally that can now monitor the ­location, health, safety and wellbeing of the people working in the process.

“Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen technology go ahead in leaps and bounds in the process monitoring and machine monitoring capability, but we haven’t seen the technology that monitors how people, how workforces are and where they are.

“We were born out of industrial technology, but monitoring the health, safety and wellbeing of workforces around the world will include in the future how they are from a virus impact perspective,” Mr Tastula said.

“If you’ve got a critical crew that run an expensive-to-shut-down refinery that’s critical to a country’s exports and gross domestic product and all those important things to countries and suddenly you have a whole workforce go down and that workforce can’t be replaced?

“It’s going to be very important to monitor that and ­really the only way to monitor the status of the worker from a health perspective is to monitor biometric data and that indicates the early onset of virus.

“Once that happens, quarantining, tracing, we can have historical data here about exactly where people were, where they contacted each other, where they work in the same area of the facility together.

“You can go back and use the data for contact tracing and then identify who should basically be going into quarantine,” Mr Tastula said.

It isn’t a great stretch to see its effectiveness in a domestic environment. “From a government perspective, we can put a geo-fenced area around somebody who has elected to quarantine at home,” he said.

“You can also real-time monitor their biometric status to see if they start to show signs of an issue, a rising body temperature, an elevated heart rate,” he said.

“In the future, dropping blood oxygen level, one of the devices we’re developing here, which probably in 2022 will be our own biometrics monitor which will look at heart rate, skin temperature or core body temperature indication and blood oxygen level.

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