Best Foot Forward - Melbourne Company Creates 'Foot Handle' to Help Fight COVID-19

A Melbourne-based joinery company has devised on ingenious plan to combat the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace, by creating a “foot handle” to replace door handles.

It’s recommended that often-used surfaces, including door handles, are regularly cleaned to help stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

Employees at the company in question, Trendgosa, use hand sanitizers frequently but with the company running low on stock and struggling to refill them, they decided to remedy the situation by looking within their company for answers.

The company decided to remove handles from doors, replacing them with a custom-made bracket at the bottom of the door that enables employees to open and close doors using only their feet.

Trendgosa’s chief information officer, Charles Caruana, took a video of the new device in action before posting it to his personal Twitter account on March 23.

Caruana told Storyful that the company had started practicing hand hygiene last winter, installing hand sanitizers next to high traffic internal doors, before feeling compelled to employ more initiatives to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

He said, “In light of the COVID-19 virus we doubled down on the hand sanitizers every time we opened the doors. However, this was not viable as we are now down to our last refills with stock, not getting replenished for three months. I had to come up with a simple way to be able to open the door without touching the handles.”

He added, “I engaged the talents of our factory go-to guy and told him to try putting a simple bracket to the bottom of the door and test it out. He had a bracket on the door in 20 minutes and it worked great so we took the handles off six doors and had this system up and running in an hour. We are all very concerned about this virus and keep hearing the only way to stop it is to stop the spread. This is our little contribution.” Credit: Charles Caruana via Storyful