CO-Slider: a tool to keep the elderly safe in COVID times

Fact: the coronavirus can survive up to 3 days on plastic or metal surfaces and it's scary. Living your normal life becomes challenging.

Gloves are an answer as individual safety equipment but should be dedicated to hospitals in priority to avoid shortage.

So we, at www.techlabs.ch, organized a Hackathon here in Basel, Switzerland with 9 years old kids: 6 hours to design and produce a cheap and easy to reproduce 3D printed solution.

After a rich brainstorm, they came up with the following features:

• help the elderly first,
• operate a switch or press an elevator button for instance,
• operate a door handle or a shopping cart,
• grab small objects.

Several sketches later, here is their idea :

The team used Onshape.com as its collaborative CAD tool. The kids figured out early that they wanted to help elderly people with their innovation.

So the entire shape, size and global ergonomy of CO-Slider are meant to perfectly fit in the hands of the elderly.

The entire CO-Slider can be produced in one single print on any FDM printer.

To increase the safety of the device, we decided to use PLActive filament from https://copper3d.com/. This material is an active antimicrobial material that kills any virus or bacteria within a few minutes or hours.

We hope our design will be 3D printed everywhere to help the elderly retrieve their normal lives.

Louis, Timothy, Zeno, Lenia, Gabriel and Valeria, www.techlabs.ch.