Are public touchscreens safe to touch?
Are public touchscreens safe to touch?
Yes. Probably. Most of the time, but not always.
We’ve done the math, and there are better options out there.
Keep reading
In our recent paper published by the Royal Society called “Modelling disease transmission from touchscreen user interfaces“ (see link to paper) we have built a simulation environment of a network of touchscreens and modeled how people interact with them. This is schematically shown in the figure below. A queue of people start to use touchscreens at different locations. Sometimes, someone will use 2 or 3 touchscreens in sequence. Sometimes, someone will come and clean the screen with soap. Meanwhile, sometimes, someone may have dirty fingers thereby infecting the touchscreen with pathogens (bacteria or viruses) which someone else may pick up, infect themselves, or carry forward to the next touchscreen they use. It’s quite an interesting dynamical system with simple feedback loops and interactions.
This is just a model, what about a real example?
We applied our model to London Heathrow Airport (LHR) Terminal 5 involving two touchscreens (check-in and bag-drop) and found that in order to reduce the “infection rate“, we would need to clean those screens 100s of times per day. That’s a lot!
Our paper attracted quite some attention from the public mass media since it came out right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, July 2021.
This included media from the UK, Australian, and Cyprus news articles and magazines: The courier, Worldakkam, SigmaLive, Paideia-News, CyBC news (TV), PhileNews, Cosmos, YgeiaWatch, EuropeanOfficeCyprus, PreLights, Scimex, StockWatch, In-Cyprus, Politis, CyprusMail, and CNA.
A follow-up scientific paper was produced (see link to paper) with further modeling complexity and accuracy validating and expanding on the results of the first paper.