Redesign of Novel Hand Sanitising Door Handle Product for UK Market

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OpenClean Technologies sells globally unique hand-sanitising door handles. We make award-winning, patented devices that turn the threat posed by door handles into an opportunity to sanitise hands. We want to address the needs of the UK and European markets for sanitising solutions that help make public buildings safe during and after the pandemic. Unfortunately, one of our two products -- TurnClean, requires substantial design and manufacturing changes to be used in the UK. The proposed project will address this problem.Our project is important because the pandemic has challenged all businesses. All public buildings have now become a threat especially to those populations that are most vulnerable. It falls to every business owner to make their facilities safe. Unfortunately, offices, factories, schools, restaurants and hotels were not designed with infection control in mind. Importantly, they have lots of touch points where visitors and workers can deposit and pick up infections.One such common touchpoint is the door handle. The WHO, PHE and the NHS have all warned about the dangers of picking up infections from door handles. Over time, there have been many attempts to design door handles that remain clean resulting in copper handles, silver ion handles, and even spray systems that spray sanitising fluid on the handle. Additionally, architects have tried to design them out of buildings entirely.None of these solutions are sufficient. Door handles are and will remain extremely common in all buildings -- they can only ever be partially designed out. Further, door handles made of expensive materials and coatings have proven ineffective against the novel coronavirus with studies showing that the virus can remain on expensive antimicrobial copper for two hours.Our products are different. Our aim is not to make the handle clean but rather to make hands clean. By combining a door handle with a hand sanitiser dispenser we make hand sanitisation easy and intuitive.Our TurnClean product has been designed for American doors and American door handle fittings. TurnClean is not a door handle, but rather an aluminium, alcohol sanitiser dispenser that is designed integrate seamlessly with the handle. US door latches are most commonly designed around 3-inch hole whereas UK and European latches are very different. This means that we are unable to sell our turn clean product in the UK. However, principally the problem is the same we need a device which makes turning door handles safe.We are applying for this grant because we would like to make a UK and European version of our TurnClean product. Though the potential market for our products is very large, our company is small. Our investors have provided sufficient funds for us to become established in the UK, but not enough to cover redesign and manufacture of the TurnClean product. If we are successful in this application we will convert our existing US-focused product for the UK market. We will use this fund to design, prototype and test this product.