During recent years, there are many research report or news discussing about germs, bacteria and microbes on key surfaces in public places, like buttons on elevators, ATMs, public pay phones, vending machines, parking kiosk and so on. The results reveal those public surfaces may carry 10 to 400 times bacteria than a toilet seat.

I believe many people once think about it when taking elevators. Some articles suggest use a key or other part of a hand to touch those key surfaces. Most are inconvenient or inproperly in public places. In real world, most people keep using fingers touching keys without an easy and effective solution.

Few years ago, I noticed this issue. With thinking about variant methods like chemical, physical, nano particle, UV light etc., I believe the best way is using the contactless button. This is similar to the auto flush urinals and the auto faucet which are popular and providing convenient and safety service.

During 2002-2003 SARS period, most contries emphasized sanitizing elevator buttons and hand sanitizer several times a day. The diluted bleach caused a larger number of printed circuit boards damaged in the buttons, said a maintenance service provider.

Due to elevator industry is occupied by few companies in the world, it is harder to convince a large company to modify existed models. I found that a compatible retro-fit design is necessary. A button can sense a finger approching at a short distance. Or the button can be pushed down to call the elevator in case the contactless function failed. It is a redundant design.

Contactless button senses a finger approching via signal change. The signal threshold can be adjusted by software. Normal setting would be in 3cm or 1 inch. 

After applying Taiwan、Japan and US patents , there is still no such design on the market. I decided to jump into the implementation to make it a real product. It is a long way to go. This idea may not be perfect. Any suggestion is welcome. Anyone being interested in the developing or marketing on this topic is welcome to have a talk. Email me, [email protected] .

In addition to elevators, a contactless button is able to be applied to device buttons in public places such as ATMs, public pay phones, water machine, vending machines, light switch, parking kiosk etc..

A contactless elevator button has some other extending application such as intelligent hospital or building. With the network connectivity among 'advanced' contactless elevator buttons, automobile vehicles and backend intelligent software service, a automobile cart can call a elevator to move between different floors to excute planned tasks.

In energy saving, applying various sensors in elevator waiting area and connecting those sensors to contactless buttons is a effective way for dynamically calculating optimal operation model among multiple elevators.