The Hygienic Echo Journey

Hygienic Echo: The Result of 17 Years of Research

Hygienic Echo began with a simple but urgent mission: to prevent infections, save lives, and support the healthcare heroes who care for our most vulnerable. Behind this mission stands a story shaped by decades of scientific research, engineering creativity, and clinical insight.

The company was co-founded by a multidisciplinary team — including world-renowned healthcare engineer Dr. Geoff Fernie — united by a shared belief: that technology, when thoughtfully designed and tested in the real world, can help eliminate preventable harm in healthcare.

The story of Hygienic Echo traces back to decades of groundbreaking work led by Dr. Fernie and a dedicated team who came together around the idea that smarter, science-backed hand hygiene solutions could dramatically reduce hospital-acquired infections and protect both patients and staff.

What began as a research question in a Toronto lab has since grown into a commercial platform that is transforming hand hygiene culture in hospitals, long-term care homes, and beyond. And at the heart of that journey is one of Canada’s most respected innovators.

Over 17 years, Dr. Fernie and his research team developed a wearable solution that revolutionized infection prevention by focusing on hand hygiene practice improvement. This system, developed in partnership with front-line clinicians and infection prevention experts, became the foundation of Hygienic Echo — a company created to bring research into the real world.

Meet the Co-Founder: Dr. Geoff Fernie, The Scientist Behind the Solution

Dr. Geoff Fernie, CM, OOnt, PhD, PEng, CEng, FCAHS, FCAE, is a globally recognized healthcare innovator, bioengineer, and one of Canada’s most distinguished healthcare engineers. Over the course of his 40-year career, Dr. Fernie has led multidisciplinary teams, published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, helped change building codes, redesigned health products, and reimagined care practices across Canada. He has led breakthrough research into rehabilitation, aging, fall prevention, and infection control.

Today, Dr. Fernie serves as a Senior Scientist at Toronto Rehab and holds the Creaghan Family Chair in Prevention and Healthcare Technologies at the University of Toronto. He is also the founding force behind the KITE Research Institute, which has grown into one of the world’s leading hubs for rehabilitation science and health innovation.

He has been honored with the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario, among many other accolades. But more than his credentials, Dr. Fernie is known for solving real-world problems through practical, human-centered innovation. Hygienic Echo is the continuation of that work.

A Legacy of Innovation, Born in a World-Class Lab

Though Hygienic Echo is an independent company, its story is inseparable from the one-of-a-kind research environment where it was born. For nearly two decades, Dr. Fernie led research at what is now known as the KITE Research Institute — part of the University Health Network (UHN) — where hand hygiene wearable badges and other transformative ideas took shape.

In 2003, Dr. Fernie proposed an ambitious idea: converting an underground space beneath University Avenue into a world-class rehabilitation simulation facility. It became home to StreetLab, WinterLab, StairLab, and other specialized environments that allowed researchers to test everything from fall prevention to accessibility and infection risk.

Under his leadership as Research Director, KITE grew from a small research division into a powerhouse of healthcare innovation, eventually becoming the top-ranked rehabilitation research institute in the world, with a reputation for translating science into life-saving action.

While leading KITE, Dr. Fernie began focusing on a quiet but deadly issue: hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). These infections — many of them preventable — kill over 100,000 patients every year in North America. Even before COVID-19, he had already been asking a vital question:

How can we make hand hygiene smarter, more intuitive, and truly effective — without blaming staff or overloading them?

It was in this environment — one of multidisciplinary collaboration and user-centered design — that the first versions of the hand hygiene wearable badges were tested, iterated, and refined. Hygienic Echo grew directly from that experience and culture of innovation.

A Career Rooted in Compassion

Dr. Fernie’s journey into healthcare engineering didn’t begin in a lab, but in a hospital home for children with severe disabilities. As a young undergraduate in the U.K., he spent a summer at Chailey Heritage, where he lived and worked alongside children born with missing limbs due to thalidomide exposure.

That experience revealed to him how engineering — when applied with empathy — could change lives. It led him to pursue a PhD in bioengineering and eventually brought him to Canada, where he built a lifelong career advancing assistive technologies, safety systems, and health policy.

From Toronto Western Hospital to Sunnybrook, and ultimately to Toronto Rehab, Dr. Fernie built a reputation not only as a brilliant scientist and engineer, but as a builder of teams, mentor of researchers, and champion of prevention.

A Legacy That’s Just Getting Started

At Hygienic Echo, we are more than a startup. We are the continuation of a legacy that began in a children’s hospital, grew in Canada’s top research institutions, and is now reaching healthcare facilities across the country.

Dr. Fernie’s fingerprints are on everything we do — from our engineering standards to our values. His legacy isn’t just in lab designs or publications — it’s in the lives saved, the safety codes changed, and the new generation of scientists he’s mentored.

We are proud to carry forward this legacy — not alone, but as a team of co-founders and collaborators who believe in making healthcare safer through science, compassion, and action.

We’re proud to carry forward the spirit of Dr. Fernie’s work — supporting healthcare workers, empowering organizations, and protecting the lives of patients everywhere.

Our journey began with one man’s mission, but today, it’s a shared movement.
And we invite you to be part of it.

Join us in creating a future where clean hands save more lives than ever before.