A Hygiene Monitoring System

In the healthcare industry, patients are often exposed to harmful pathogens due to a lack of compliance to hand hygiene protocol. The vast majority of healthcare professionals do not abide by hand hygiene standards established by the World Health Organization, facilitating the spread of nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections. When representatives trained in proper handwashing procedures monitored medical professionals, there was a significant increase in compliance to proper protocol. Given this correlation between observance and adherence, a Hygiene Monitoring System was developed to monitor handwashing through the application of machine learning. The embedded system captured, processed, and compared instances of handwashing to the known procedure. An implementation of this system would encourage healthcare professionals to follow official protocol denoted by the World Health Organization and dramatically reduce the spread of healthcare-associated infections.