A Hospital Door Handle That Sanitizes Hands With a Touch

One design studio's clever solution to in-hospital infections? A door handle that encourages people to clean their hands every time they use it.
PullClean puts sanitization in hospital workers039 quotline of motion.quot Image Agency of Design
PullClean puts sanitization in hospital workers' "line of motion."Image: Agency of Design

One in 25 patients in U.S. hospitals acquires an infection during their stay in the hospital, according to a comprehensive study released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Clean hands can help mitigate the problem, but getting hospital workers to use sanitizer regularly has proven tough. One design studio's clever solution? A door handle that encourages people to clean their hands every time they use it.

The handle, PullClean, was developed by the British studio Agency of Design for Altitude Medical. It's a simple column that can be fitted on any pull door, with a blue paddle on bottom that dispenses a dab of hand sanitizer when pushed. The aim, the designers explain, is to "make it so simple that sanitizing becomes habitual every time you open the door."

Hospitals are already littered with sanitizer bottles and wall-mounted dispensers. But the problem isn't that hospital workers avoid using them; it's simply that they forget to.

The big insight with PullClean was to combine that sanitizing act with something hospital workers already do every day. "Altitude Medical came to us with the idea of putting hand sanitizers ‘in the line of motion’ of staff," says Rich Gilbert, a co-founder of Agency of Design. "They knew their position on corridor walls meant that they weren't used enough and that a simple reposition could have a radical impact."

The handle, invented by Altitude Medical co-founders Alex Oshmyanksy and Jacob McKnight, was carefully tuned to encourage use. Agency of Design toyed with ideas of how to force the behavior, and looked at some high-tech solutions involving personalized reminders using things like RIFD tags, but ultimately elected to go with a frictionless, "opt-in" design. "We wanted to make the interaction as simple as possible, trying to make it almost subconscious," Gilbert says. "You're already holding it, so you might as well use the other hand to dispense sanitizer."

They also tested a variety of designs for the dispenser itself, deciding that the blue paddle offered the most obvious affordance. The paddle is tapered slightly outwards from the handle, helping it stand out, and it also bends slightly forward, inviting passersby to flatten it. "This is taking some of the visual language of a fire exit paddle, to try and make it say ‘push me,'" Gilbert says. A clinical trial of a slightly different prototype handle in a U.S. hospital saw the rate of sanitation rise from 24 percent to 77 percent after the prototype handle was installed.

A web application lets hospital administrators track the handle's use.

Agency of Design

The smart hardware is only part of the solution. The refillable handles also come with built-in sensors that link to a web application, letting administrators see how often the dispensers are being activated in relation to how frequently the doors are opened. Hospitals will be able to track sanitation rates over time and compare their use at different locations throughout the facility.

While it's impossible to say how many fatalities hospital-acquired infections are directly responsible for, CDC Director Tom Frieden offered a striking statistic earlier this week: "Today and every day, more than 200 Americans with healthcare-associated infections will die during their hospital stay." Clean hands won't solve the problem completely, but building sanitation into the day-to-day work flow of hospital employees certainly can't hurt.

PullClean will ship later this year for $200.