Automatic Hand Sanitiser

In the light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, I hope everyone is safe and healthy. Taking care of yourself and your dear one’s through necessary precautions is very important. Among these precautionary measures, compulsory usage of face mask along with hand sanitisation, regular hand washing, plays an important role, especially when you are visiting a public place. Coming to regular hand sanitisers available in the market, they need you or someone to press a nozzle for the liquid to be dispensed on your hand. This forms a point of contact for many people and can become a potential fomite in spreading infections. To eliminate this, many companies have come up with many products that can dispense hand sanitiser without the need to touch the bottle. But the thing is they are ridiculously overpriced. Since long I have been an electronics enthusiast and I have been active in various forums where many people are making these kind of products at an affordable price. I thought why not make one such product for the hospital and I have been successful in designing one with materials that are readily available at the hospital except for some electronics. This is not a new invention but just a way around so as to prevent us shelling some heavy bucks to some corporates for the same product. What this product does is, it detects an object/hand near the nozzle using an INFRARED OBSTACLE SENSOR and relays this information to an ARDUINO NANO, which is a micro-controller (sort of BRAIN of the project) that then directs the submersible pump to switch on and dispense the hand sanitiser onto the hand. When the hand is removed the same sensor detects that and the ARDUINO now shuts off the pump automatically, thereby eliminating the need for someone to operate the bottle and to some extent removes a point of contact among people. 

The same thing can be modified to dispense a soap solution and to automatically switch on a tap in the sink to facilitate hand washing. Yes, you need some coding experience to make this but believe me programming an ARDUINO is way easy and can be learnt way faster than conventional languages like C, C++, Python etc.

This is one way along with regular sanitisation of OPD’s, enforcing social distancing, thorough screening of each and everyone entering the premises, through which we at OMNI Hospitals, Kukatpally are taking care of our staff and patients and we are happy to inform you all, that we are fully open and ready to deal with any kind of patients and emergencies. So, don’t worry about your safety at OMNI Hospitals.

Dr Karthik Venegalla
Department of Emergency Medicine,
OMNI Hospitals, Kukatpally