There is a theme each FLL season. This year it is Food Safety. Our assignment was to research the topic, trace a food item from harvest to the table – farm to fork. During its journey discover what could contaminate it, and then choose a problem to solve. We need to share our research with others. Finally, we get to present our research to a panel of judges at the tournament on December 10th. Below is a condensed version for our website.
Project Description
For our food journey, we traced shrimp from birth to the restaurant table. We met a Moe’s owner who told us about their food safety program, then toured the restaurant. We rated our own kitchens with the food safety inspection form. We analyzed the inspection reports for all of the restaurants in the Woodstock area. Hand-washing related violations were a major issue. This was the focus of our research.
Here is the problem. Food safety is in danger when employees don’t wash their hands. Our research shows:
- 76,000,000 food-borne incidents account for about 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospital visits each year. It cost the US about $35 billion annually.
- Hand washing is the most effective way to prevent the spread of illness. About 67% of those deaths could be prevented, if everyone just washed their hands!
- 96% of people say they wash their hands, but only 85% actually do. A study at Turner field showed that only 77% of men washed their hands after using the rest room! 98% of women did.
We researched a couple alternate solutions that we did not use.
- Making an iPhone app that would tell people to wash their hands when the GPS located them at a restaurant, but it was too user dependent and complicated.
- We also looked at a plastic material that has a sharkskin pattern called Sharklet, which is highly resistant to bacteria growth. We thought about making cutting boards with it, but it is not cut resistant.
Our innovative solution, the “Germinator”, is a system that ensures employees wash their hands and documents this for management. Here’s how it works.
- When the employee enters the store, his RFID name tag flashes red. This alerts him, the manager and customers that he needs to wash his hands.
- When he dispenses soap AND runs water for 20 seconds AND the Microsoft Kinect sees his hands in motion under the water, the name tag will turn solid green, so everyone will see that he really washed his hands properly.
- Each event is logged in a database.
(click to enlarge)

We did a hand washing experiment to verify that 20 seconds, the time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice, is a good amount of time to wash your hands.

We did not find any similar patents to our system. There is an automatic hand washer on the market, but it is huge, expensive and a little scary! Our system could be installed in just about any two restrooms for about $3,200. This is a very good investment considering one food contamination incident can cost the store money, and more importantly, their reputation. It could also cost someone their health or even their life!