SureWash Hand Hygiene guidance and measurement system over the sink

Challenge

COVID-19 has raised everyone awareness of the importance of hand hygiene, however before it arrived, 9 million infections occur each year in European hospitals and care facilities (European centre for disease control https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/infographic-healthcare-associated-infections-threat-patient-safety-europe), and in the US, hospital acquired infections kills 100,000 patients each year and cost $45 Billion. In fact, seven percent (7%) of all Hospital patients in developed countries acquire infections (HAI).

The World Health Org (WHO) estimate that 50% of infections could be prevented with better hand hygiene and to reduce hand acquired infections, the WHO have developed a seven step handwashing protocol that mitigates the risk of bacteria remaining on washed hands.

Solution

Glanta T/A Surewash™ have developed an Over The Sink hand wash training and monitoring system (Surewash OTS) that provide real-time feedback to the user as they are washing their hands as to their compliance to the WHO handwashing protocol.

The goal is to increase staff compliance to the protocol, thus reduce infections and avoid the need for antibiotics to treat infections. This improves patient outcomes, shorten hospital stay and overall results in lives saved and significant cost avoidance.

There may be many over the sink units deployed across a hospital wards and as they are “smart and connected” they capture and report real-time hand hygiene data which is aggregated and enables hospital management to visualise utilisation, track compliance, compare sites and enables early invention to prevent the outbreak of infections.

FED4SAE Support

SureWash™ partnered with both Intel, CEA and IRT-Nanoelec to develop, deploy and validate a number of prototypes. Intel Movidius engineers provided assistance on the Intel’s MyriadX™ VPU(Visual Processing Units), OpenVino and Realsense™ depth sensing camera technology.

The prototypes were deployed, tested and evaluated in the IRT-Nanoelec testbed facility. Functional testing included (GDPR) privacy and cybersecurity compliance assessment as well as usability analysis and user acceptance with potential customers. As part of the FED4SAE suite of services, SureWash is receiving support in business modelling, market insights and design to cost from Blumorpho and CEA-Open Innovation team. Intel has introduced Surewash™ to a number of potential partners to accelerate its path to market.

Impact

The working prototype was deployed at Korian Nursing Homes (France) and valuable feedback was provide to Surewash team.

The devices were used in a clinical trial within the NHS (UK) and it increased the quality of hand hygiene by 197% and the number of hand wash events by 147%. The results were published in the American Journal of Infection Control in February 2020.

SureWash are now seeking a partner to commercialise this product at scale. If you are interested in helping to roll out SureWash AVA into the marketplace, please get in touch through the following link https://surewash.com/contact-us/.

For further information about the SureWash products, visit www.surewash.com.

Video