Door Industry Journal - Spring 2018

114 THE door industry journal spring 2018 Locks & Building Hardware Feature Also online at: www.dijonline.co.uk Smart door handle that sanitises hands launched to help fight against superbugs and other infections PullClean, an innovative door handle that sanitises your hands, triples the rate of hand sanitisation rates and provides feedback on usage through a monitoring system has, for the first time, been made available to distributors in the UK. Invented by Altitude Medical UK co-founders, Dr Alex Oshmyanksy and Dr Jake McKnight, when they were students at the University of Oxford, PullClean encourages people to clean their hands every time they enter and exit a room, making hand hygiene simple and trackable. It was developed to reduce the spread of viruses and infections in any high-footfall setting such as hospitals, care homes, schools and universities, as well as leisure and hospitality venues such as hotels, restaurants, shopping centres and airports. To mark its UK launch, PullClean can be seen at the Science Museum as part of a new exhibition, ‘Superbugs: the fight for our lives’, which explores how society is responding to the enormous challenge of antibiotic resistance and bacteria evolving into superbugs. The exhibition is on until Spring 2019. While clean hands can dramatically reduce the spread of germs and infections, one of the biggest obstacles is getting people to use sanitiser regularly, because even with multiple wall-mounted dispensers, they simply forget. A pilot trial of a prototype of PullClean in the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in the USA, saw the rate of hand sanitation rise from 24 percent to 77 percent after it was installed. The design is simple: A tube-shaped cartridge is placed in the centre of a hollow door handle, which releases a small amount of sanitiser when a blue paddle button is pressed. But these door handles aren’t just savvy, they’re also smart. Each handle includes a monitoring system that records a variety of data, from how much sanitiser is left in the handle and when the cartridge should next be changed, to hourly usage stats compared to how frequently doors are opened. For healthcare settings this can include hand sanitisation rates across wards, shifts and even entire hospitals. Since November 2016, PullClean has already been used in the USA by organisations including Hilton and Marriott hotels, as well as a number of hospitals, care homes, doctor surgeries, restaurants and universities. Altitude Medical is actively looking for distributors who sell into these markets in the UK. For further information, please contact: Jacob McKnight 07872539470, jake@altitudemedical.com www.pullclean.com