Smart Shoes Lead to Clean Hands

French startup MediHandTrace has begun marketing a solution that employs RFID-tagged footwear to track whether hospital personnel are following proper hand-hygiene protocols. According to the World Health Organization, seven percent of hospital patients in developed nations will contract a hospital-acquired infection (HAI), while the number is about 10 percent in developing countries (though much higher than that in some nations). In 2006, French engineer and physicist Bernard Delord started looking for technological solutions to a universal health-care problem: preventing the spread of HAIs caused by poor hand hygiene.