BlackBerry (NASDAQ: BBRY) seems to be out of play the last few months -actually years- due to the lack of interest by consumers. But amongst the numerous brands making consumer electronics, only one is talking about special devices on which they’ve never worked before, and that is the Canadian smartphone maker.
The company’s CEO, John Chen, earlier said that they’d be switching to Android operating system for their products only if they could make it secure enough for its users. We’ve known that BlackBerry is famous for its handsets’ security, thus targeting the business segment. Recently, rumours have been heard about BlackBerry working to make a bacteria-free smartphone that can be used from hospitals.
At Canada’s Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital, BlackBerry announced a test project about a portable messaging and alert system. The CEO John Chen said:
“Health-care workers have to be worried about one less thing to wipe down,”
It is a real fact that our smartphones are amongst the dirtiest things that we use in our daily life and there is a variety of bacteria residing on the surface of the phone. It is possible that they can carry infection-causing germs, and the workers in the healthcare industry cannot always keep wiping their phones every now and then, thus leading to the rise to a higher risk of infection spreading in hospitals.
The chief medical information officer at Mackenzie Hospital, Aviv Gladman, said that the hospital-acquired infections are amongst the top reasons causing the death of patients in the hospital, about 20-30% of the germs transfer between our phones and a fingertip.
In the partnership between Cisco, BlackBerry and ThoughtWire to make a smartphone, the responsibility of developing the software and devices come under BlackBerry. The messaging and alert system that is under the works will be made by the three companies together. No news has flown out about the investments done by the three companies. Though with this project, BlackBerry will be claiming to have one of the safest solutions for hospital staff offering a secure software and a bacteria-free handset simultaneously.