FLC | NSF awards SBIR grant for ultrasonic touch screen COVID-19 disinfection technology

NSF awards SBIR grant for ultrasonic touch screen COVID-19 disinfection technology

January 26, 2021

Innovasonic, a leader in active self-cleaning technologies, today announced it has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct research and development (R&D) work on “Automatic Touch Screen Disinfection (COVID-19)”.

“NSF is proud to support the technology of the future by thinking beyond incremental developments and funding the most creative, impactful ideas across all markets and areas of science and engineering,” said Andrea Belz, Division Director of the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships at NSF. “With the support of our research funds, any deep technology startup or small business can guide basic science into meaningful solutions that address tremendous needs.”

This SBIR Phase-I project has an objective to evaluate feasibility of using ultrasonic energy to incapacitate pathogens on glass surfaces and demonstrate efficiency of this process for a variety of pathogens, including the COVID-19 virus.

“We are very excited to be given an opportunity to widen the scope of our proprietary technology, PiezoWipe, to a new important and urgent application” said Dr. Boris Kobrin, Founder and CEO of Innovasonic. “This funding will allow us to provide technology capable of fast, efficient and fully automatic disinfecting of public touch screen devices, like ATMs, self-check kiosks, automotive and in-flight infotainment systems, medical instrument screens and tablets. This process is automated and does not use any chemicals, materials, labor or harmful UV light, and can be performed safely and frequently (after each use of device). It hopefully will make touching public surfaces much less intimidating during and post-pandemic periods.”

Bruce Berkoff, Innovasonic’s display industry advisor and Chairman of the LCD TV Association, said: “It is exciting to see Innovasonic bring their path-breaking next-gen haptics touch screen technology into new realms, like this one related to public health and safety, contributing to the global need for disinfected surfaces of all types.”