Employees must wash hands before returning to work.

This is a fundamental issue, folks either forget, don’t care, or don’t do it correctly when it comes to washing their hands. I was brought in a bit after Jordan Stone had conceived the idea and had started programming the back-end.

The Problem

While 95% of people self-report washing their hands, about 5% wash their hands correctly.

Many restaurants have no reliable way of monitoring compliance with their food safety standards. This often leads to broad-stroke training and enforcement policies that have little measurable effect. The Food Services industry and other industries need a way to monitor hand washing compliance, educate employees in real-time about their adherence to procedure, and identify employees who are in need of extra training.

The Solution

Leveraging numerous AWS technologies, a hand washing compliance solution was built that can identify employees using facial recognition and monitor for proper hand washing technique. The solution coordinates multiple IoT devices and AWS services, and an Amazon API Gateway makes this data accessible to other applications for visualization by shift managers and restaurant leadership.

The Impact

Internal testing has shown that the solution has the potential to change hand washing compliance behavior by informing employees in real-time about their adherence to proper procedure. This solution has already spawned a number of additional exploration and discussion around leveraging thermal cameras and overhead cameras to watch the hands and the users’ technique.

A quick sketch idea of how the demo sink could be built, to source materials and get approvals.

This photo is our POC. This sink would break down and fit into a small Pelican Case, allowing us to travel with it for demos.

© Andrew Preble Design