GABRIEL SCIENTIFIC:HAVE YOU EVER wondered who slept on your hotel pillow before you, what ailments they had and what they did? According to Dublin-based company Gabriel Scientific, after two years of use, up to one-third of a pillow's weight can be made up of bacteria, fungal spores, as well as dead dust mites and their unsavoury secretions. This is bad enough in the home, but in hospitals it can be highly dangerous, with bedding and pillows identified as reservoirs and vectors for potentially deadly infections such as MRSA, C. Difficile and Norovirus.
Gabriel Scientific has developed a solution to this problem in the form of a pillow made from a membrane that is normally used as a filter in heart stents to keep out bacteria, and sealed by melting the edges together rather than sewing them.
“Our research began a number of years ago when my co-founder Billy Navan – who has a hospital supplies business – was talking to the seamstress in a hospital in the south of the country as she was repairing pillows,” says Gabriel chief executive David Woolfson. “She told him that every time she repaired the pillows, she got an infection in her eyes. Billy had known me for some time and knew I was very keen on RD, and that’s where we started.
He says that pillows were the “elephant in the room”. “There was a clear need to apply innovative and evolved medical-device standards to pillows, and the result is a first of its kind – a proven barrier pillow that is a registered medical device. The technology is now also applied to mattresses and wheelchair cushions and similar products.”
The source of the problem with the conventional bedding offering is the sewn seams on pillows or indeed mattresses and mattress toppers. Anywhere that allows airborne and liquid-borne bacteria to get in. Everyday bed protection is not an adequate barrier. The answer is to find a textile that can be high-frequency sealed but then the problem is that the product has to breathe in and out.
The inventors, David Woolfson and Billy Navan, identified a highly specialised micro-porous membrane laminate used as a purifying filter in heart stents. Working with leading bio-mechanical engineer Dr Duncan Bain, they adapted the micro-porous membrane laminate and applied it to pillows. Comprehensive independent laboratory testing and clinical trials demonstrated that they had achieved their goal of producing a hermetically sealed product that was a highly effective barrier to bug and bacterial ingress, yet breathable and comfortable.
The product is now in use in hospitals in Ireland and the UK, Scandinavia, Benelux and Austria and is available through retailers in UK and Ireland including Argos and John Lewis. “Our vision is to become a vital and trusted technology globally,” says Woolfson. “Just as the GoreTex swing ticket on outdoor apparel or the Tetra-Pak logo on the bottom of a milk carton is a promise of proven functionality, reliability and consumer benefit, so will be our Pneuma-Pure logo be in hospitals, hotels and homes.”
