The following article is final chapter in our 5 part series regarding the danger mobile phones pose to our heath in terms of being vectors for the growth and spread of viruses & bacteria. If you want to follow along, head back to our introduction to phone sanitization.

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The Team Behind Glissner™

In early 2020 when the COVID-19 was just a fraction of today’s scale, I looked around at the phone sanitation solution market and decided to do something different. Being a serial health tech entrepreneur, I knew the dangers of phone contamination already. Nevertheless, I looked at the problem from another angle, considering the difficulty that phone sanitation seemed to present to people, particularly relative to hand washing, which is easy, fast, and standardized.

My fiancée, Dr. Hannah Davis, was meanwhile serving on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19. In her final few months as an emergency medicine specialty resident, Hannah was in the middle of a crisis the likes of which no one in our generation had ever seen before. There were, and continue to be plenty of questions about what doctors needed to do to protect and care for their patients – as well as themselves. One thing that was beyond question, though, was the importance of sanitary practices. Approaching these practices in earnest, Hannah would spend long periods of time at the end of every shift disinfecting her phone and other belongings.

This is the process that that she followed:

* Place your phone in your pocket.
* Wash your hands.
* Open the incumbent phone sanitizer.
* Place your phone inside the incumbent phone sanitizer.
* Wash your hands again.
* Close the incumbent phone sanitizer.
* Wait for the incumbent phone sanitizer to run through its sanitation process.
* Remove your phone.

Do you see that? At every touch point, contamination was once again a possibility. It was the same for all of her colleagues: the process was multi-step and convoluted, and at the end of it, it still seemed that there was no guarantee of sanitation. They were spending long periods of time on a process that did not work as well as they needed it to work. Something needed to change.

In an attempt to supplement the decontamination process that she and her colleagues followed, Hannah started to apply disinfectant wipes to her phone. This, however, made the touchscreen on the phone less responsive, and it started to show smudges and fingerprint marks, the wipes evidently wearing the touchscreen down.

Looking into UV-C light devices together, Hannah and I realized how inadequate existing solutions were. We saw firsthand all of the shortcomings we described in the third section. As such, were back to square one, trying to bootstrap a phone sanitation solution to protect Hannah while she was doing her invaluable work at the hospital. It was not that there was nothing out there, but there was nothing viable, nothing that Hannah nor I would have felt comfortable purchasing.

That brings us to the beginning of Glissner™. As a team, we have created something that we believe will change people's lives. We look to the pioneers of sanitary healthcare, like Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis and Louis Pasteur, for inspiration, knowing that there are real obstacles in front of us but adamant about how important it is to make this shift. With more than sixty years of healthcare experience and more than $20 million in healthcare company exits on our teams’ resumes, we are prepared to navigate these obstacles and this market.

Click Here To Meet The Full Team

Sanitizing the Future

Embracing transparency, we have already started to generate testing results. We are working with reputable laboratories around the world to create literature that outlines what Glissner™ can do for the people who use it. We will make all of our results public, presenting our data for all who want to see it.

As we work to expand our production capacity, we are optimizing the manufacturing processes for our consumer-grade devices so that we can provide Glissner™ to any businesses and consumers who want them. Our tentative ship date for our first 1000 orders is September 1, 2020, after which we will have capacity to produce 1,000 units every single month.

We have set a clear and measurable goal for ourselves: to become the leader in rapid handheld device sanitation. While we are focusing on phones for now, we will in time extend ourselves into any devices that people use and that could serve as vectors for bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens. We are operating from a set of values, the most important of which are safeguarding health and saving lives.

Ambitious as our goal may be, we know that we have the technology and expertise to back it up. We are aware of what else is available on the market, and we foresee Glissner™ becoming the solution of choice.

Now more than ever, we can chip away at old habits and replace them with new and better ones. The problem is going to be there one way or another: in each of our pockets, there is a phone, and if the phone goes unsanitized, then it is playing host to bacteria and viruses. Glissner™ can and will change that.

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