PhoneSoap – Charge and Sanitize Your Cell Phone – Healthcare Gadget Friday

Many of you know we have our regular Meaningful Use Monday series that we’ve been doing for almost a year now. Today I decided that it would be fun to create a new series I’m calling Healthcare Gadget Friday. I’m not sure I’ll do it every single Friday, but I’d like to do it most Fridays.

I’m kicking off this series with a gadget a friend of mine emailed me about called: PhoneSoap. You can read all about PhoneSoap and pre-order one on this kickstarter page (If you haven’t seen Kickstarter before it’s a pretty amazing website). Here’s the overview of the PhoneSoap product:

PhoneSoap is a small box that simultaneously charges and sanitizes your cell phone using UV-C light. UV-C light is electromagnetic radiation that’s used in hospitals and clean rooms around the world. This short wavelength of light penetrates the cell wall of the bacteria and disrupts its DNA, effectively killing it. It is 99.9% effective in killing bacteria and virus’. Best of all it is completely safe.The UV-C light is only on for 3-5 minutes at a time and there is no heat or liquid involved so there is no risk of damaging your phone. There is a UV-C light on the top and on the bottom of the box so that the UV rays surround your phone for complete sanitization. Take a look at our before and after pictures to see how powerful PhoneSoap is:

I’ll admit that I’m no expert on UV-C light and its uses in healthcare, but I hope that some of our readers are familiar with it. I’d love to learn more about what you know about its ability to sanitize.

With that said, I think it’s a pretty creative product. I could see healthcare people putting their cell in this when they get home after a day in the hospital or even on the drive home from work. I’ve seen long discussions online about the best wipes or other awkward solutions to use to clean and sanitize devices in healthcare. I wonder if this could be a better solution…at least for cell phones. I imagine they could later make one for iPads as well.

What do people think of this idea? Could this be beneficial in healthcare? Are you guys worried about carrying around a germ infected cell phone that doesn’t ever get clean?

Considering the number of devices that have entered the healthcare environment and will continue to become part of healthcare, we’re going to need something that does a good job cleaning these devices. I’ll be interested to hear what you think of the PhoneSoap device.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

7 Comments

  • Great idea!! I just pledged 40 dollars to pre-order mine. UV light is used in isolation rooms in the hospital…especially in rooms with tuberculosis patients. Tried and true way of reducing bacteria

  • I can only imagine the amount of VRE’s and other bad guys lurking on clinician’s cell phones as they see each patient, especially on rounds at the hospital! As there has been shown to be a significant reduction in transmission of hospital born diseases through enforcement of hand-washing policies, I can’t help wonder how this compares to sanitation policies and procedures for other clinician associated artifacts, beginning with the pen, paper, and clipboards that EMRs are replacing and going further to items such as stethoscopes, lab coats, and even perhaps wristwatches, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, and jewelry?

  • UV-C is great for sanitizing. Its downsides are: (1) you must protect your eyes (as Phonesoap’s container appears to do); and (2) it is extremely damaging to most plastics (as is cautioned when used inside air ducting systems).

    I would certainly wonder what it might do to the plastic casing on my cellphone.

  • Chlamydia
    I know a guy a couple weeks ago that got chlamydia of the MOUTH! Gross! I used to only be afraid of toilet seats and bathroom faucets. …Instead of Western medicine, he decided to use Eastern (Chinese) medicine and he was cured in a few days. Apparently it effects the whole body? He said it elevates your internal blood temp., and gives you an itchy rash all over. So in sum, yes I think it is a great idea, but choosing how and where to deploy it first is the question.

  • I have found that as I had more kids, I became more of a germ-a-phobe. Also, now as my kids get older, I continue to hone my germ-a-phobe ways.

    Even if you never set foot in a hospital or doctors office, my guess is your phone will have plenty of goobers on it.

    I think something like this is great, as long as it doesn’t damage the phone as mentioned above – might it turn your white iPhone pink? I also wonder what might happen to the LCD screen sub-structure from this light exposure?

    It has always cracked me up that restaurants post the hand washing signs, my thought is DUH!

    Then, as mentioned above, I’ve read many article on hospital hand washing…again, this seems like a DUH moment, but obviously I don’t get it.

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