A revolutionary device for Stethoscope disinfection won the “Product Innovation Award 2016” 02 February 2016
Vancouver, February 2nd 2016. This original device has been invented, designed and created in Italy, more specifically in Toscana, well known for good wines and beautiful landscapes.
Stet Clean won the award as “UV Product Innovation” from the International Ultraviolet Association (IUVA) and Dr. Gabriele Messina received this important prize during the Gala dinner organized at the “Fairmont Hotel”, in Vancouver (BC).
His start-up egoHEALTH, in collaboration with Light Progress, Italian manufacturer of UV-C devices, has been studying the groundbreaking application of LEDs in the disinfection field since 2012.
They began to pursue these studies following some researches, held by the University of Siena, which identified how an incorrect stethoscope hygiene contributes to the spread of Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI).
In fact, cross contamination between patients leads to deaths, complications, as well as increase costs for healthcare assistance every year.
The idea of Stet Clean was originally born from an intuition and a “bet” while LEDs represent a very new application frontier of Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI), recognized technology for disinfection.
However, until a few years ago it seemed almost impossible to design LEDs devices both for high costs and for the lack of correct definition of application techniques standards.
"Stet Clean turns Stethoscope’s hygiene into an automatic gesture. It does not change the Doctors’ habit, but it revolutionized the concept of disinfection itself" says Dr. Messina "with Stet Clean disinfection operations do not interfere with work, on the contrary Stet Clean shares the purposes of every doctor: caring about patients and improve their health”.
This important award, along with others received over the past years, recognizes the great work made by this team, which also published the article “A new UV-LED device for automatic disinfection of stethoscope membranes” on the “American journal of Infection Control” on August 2015.
The product’s launch in Europe will be next spring; egoHEALTH and Light Progress are looking for partners in North and South America, trying to go further with this project as they are also working on a complete pipeline of UVGI-LEDs products in the meanwhile.