Who We Are
People, especially children, do not wash effectively or frequently.
As a career medical clinician who works in a hospital, I have always been acutely aware of the importance of proper hand hygiene. As a mother of three, I was always thinking of strategies for helping hand washing be an ingrained habit, with limited success. Enter COVID, with my job, three kids in school and two sets of elderly parents nearby. All of a sudden, it was personal. Any of us could come down with this, or the other myriad of contagious diseases, and actually die.
Studies show that students miss nearly 189 million school every year and parents miss nearly 126 million work annually by staying home to care for their school-aged children. However, studies also show that one intervention with scheduled opportunities for cleaning hands throughout the school day produced as much as a 50 percent reduction in absences.
Knowing the power of electronic toys and games, I began to wonder if making handwashing a game, with competitions and rewards, could help ingrain hand wash habits through behavior modification. So, I began crafting a way to make hand washing fun, such that people would do it more often, until eventually, they build a habit of washing anywhere, any time , every time.
GERMZAPP is made by Athela, LLC and manufactured in Buena Vista, Virginia.
Our educational system revolutionizes hand hygiene by the use of our anonymous reporting data to create competitions, games, rewards, and other fun.
Lowers your risk:
- Absenteeism
- Decreased productivity
- Lost profit
- Lost reputation
- Lost government funding
Additional gains:
- Simple to install and use
- Affordable
- Fun, engaging, empowering
- Behavior change
- Habit building
Vision
To create improved and sustained hand washing habits through the power of games.
Misson
To be the leading system used for decreased germ transference which aims to mitigate health risks.
Purpose
To make the world a safer, healthier place by empowering people and organizations to achieve better hand wash habits.
Our Company
WE BROKE THE MOLD by modeling our system after gaming products that are engaging and fun, we have broken the mold by making our anonymous education tool record the compliant and noncompliant wash data into leaderboards with associated competitions, games and rewards.
- We saw the niche market for schools, and businesses, and jumped on it.
- It starts with easy to follow real time audio and visual cuing. The education follows the Center for Disease Control ( CDC) recommended steps and timing.
- Our unique data use for fun games and competition helps to improve engagement to develop improved habits for safety in the immediate environment, while empowering individuals to use this skill everywhere. Unlike signs that are largely ignored, or unsupervised kiosks, our “ fun factor” increases engagement and habit building.