A group of college students has developed a series of devices for a Michigan-based company that addresses a common problem for healthcare workers: keeping hands sanitized and clean.
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“Every day, about 250 people across the country die from hospital infections, and over half of infections are caused by direct contact,” said Sterilogy president Hal Zaima in a prepared statement. “It results in more than $30 billion in unnecessary costs to hospitals.”
The students based their system on an idea from Sterilogy co-founder Bradley Ahlgren, an orthopedic surgeon who found wall-mounted sanitizers inconvenient and often empty. Ahlgren started carrying around canisters of sanitizers in his scrubs.
Zaima enlisted the help of aMDI in spring 2017 to design, build and test a series of prototypes for the hand hygiene system, which includes three separate devices. The personal sanitizer unit (PSU) is a body-worn device that dispenses the foam sanitizer; the zone alert emitter unit is attached to a patient’s bed and communicates with the PSU to remind healthcare workers to sanitize; and the base station unit is placed at a central location, like a nurse’s station, and uploads data from PSUs when they are in close range.
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