A keyboard designed to be easy to clean has been released for distribution in the UK in order to help hospitals keep down MRSA infection rates.
The SlimKey-MD keyboards (below) are built out of silicone rubber and polycarbonate, and are built in one piece. They come with a choice of standard touchpads and ‘joystick’-style controllers for the mouse pointer.
Frank Beresford, who runs the UK distributors FB Peripherals, explained: "What we have got here is a keyboard with a single surface and no gaps where organisms can breathe and be passed on."
The keys sit low compared to other keyboards. While this makes touch-typing slightly trickier than usual, it allows less room for dirt to hide and makes cleaning easier.
The keyboard was in no way intended to replace normal cleaning regimes, he explained, but was designed to be easier to sluice clean with regular hospital cleaning solutions. According to Beresford, the keyboard was already being used by a number of hospitals in the UK.
According to a study undertaken in a Chicago hospital earlier this year, regular keyboards were found to harbour so-called ‘superbug’ infections even after they were cleaned according to the manufacturers’ instructions with soap and water. Clinicians were advised to wash their hands after every time after using a keyboard.
The hardware is manufactured by IKEY, a company based in Austin, Texas, and around 200 hospitals in the US were using the SlimKey Keyboards. Tony Zavaleta, marketing director at IKEY, told EHI: "Feedback has been very strong."
The equipment had been put through a simple test at Ball State University, Indiana, where researchers in the microbiology department treated the keyboards with MRSA and then immediately disinfected them using 10% bleach solution. Testing them a number of times for a period up to an hour showed no sign of bacterial infection.
IKEY, who manufacture a series of keyboards and peripherals for general industrial use, are also selling a companion two-button optical mouse made out of the same materials that is also designed to be easy to wipe clean in hospitals.
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