ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.- Ruidoso Municipal Schools will begin using six robots to help clean classrooms.
“What we have is it’s what we call it a germ-zapping robot that uses a pulsed xenon ultraviolet to kill stuff on surfaces,” said Mark Stibich, founder of Xenex. “We’ve been around a little over 10 years, and we’re in about 750 hospitals in the U.S. and worldwide.
Stibich lives in Santa Fe, and said he’s proud a local school district will be using the technology.
“We tested directly against the SARS COVID 2 virus, which is the virus that causes COVID,” Stibich said. “And we saw that in just a few minutes, we were able to get a 99.99% and better reduction on the surfaces.”
The light also works on other viruses and bacteria.
“We have UVA and UVB, if you have a higher energy version of that as UVC, it doesn’t naturally occur on earth,” Stibich said. “It’s filtered by the ozone layer so our viruses and bacteria have no defenses, they’ve never encountered this energy before. And so it’s able to really quickly deactivate them or and damage them um on surfaces in the environment.”
Stibich claims the robots can deactivate the virus that causes COVID-19 in two minutes.
“Everything gets hit at once, but we want to make sure we’re getting enough light on the targeted surface and that’s why we put sort of a limit to you know how far away things should be,” he said.
View original article: https://www.kob.com/new-mexico-news/ruidoso-schools-invests-in-robots-to-keep-classrooms-clean/5930773/