ZEISS UVClean Earns Two Red Dot Awards and is Recognized for Excellence in Industrial Design and Innovative Product
Prestigious awards recognize the right technology, designed at the right time to support safety, hygiene and productivity at vision care facilities
San Diego, CA, United States | 22 April 2021 | ZEISS Vision Care
ZEISS Vision Care US announced that the ZEISS UVClean technology, an optometry-specific UV-C disinfecting device designed primarily for eyecare professionals, has earned two coveted Red Dot Awards: one for Industrial Design and the second for Innovative Product.
The Red Dot Award is recognized as one of the most prestigious international awards for design work. Each year, the Red Dot jury reviews thousands of entries. Winning products are presented in an annual ceremony and exhibited in the Red Dot Design Museums in Essen, Germany, Singapore, and the Red Dot Design Yearbook.
“Design was a primary consideration for the UVClean,” said Jens Boy, president of ZEISS Vision Care North America. “Eyecare professionals required an efficient, affordable, and space-saving device to meet the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic. These awards applaud our design and production teams, who balanced expediency with function to carry a beautiful device to market.”
Designed with aesthetics in mind, the ZEISS UVClean deploys four germicidal UVC bulbs to bathe each pair of eyeglasses in powerful UV light. The unit can disinfect 6-10 frames in 40 seconds and kills up to 99.5% of common viruses and bacteria on the surface of eyeglasses. The product was designed to enable eye care practices to spend less time and resources cleaning and more time engaging with their patients.
The design and manufacture of UVClean was in response to the poor selection of disinfectant choices faced by eyecare professionals. Standard “soap and water” cleaning is slow and labor-intensive, and frames may not be sufficiently dry for patients’ immediate use. Alcohol-based solutions or hydrogen peroxide can potentially damage frames over time and come with a distinctive and unpleasant smell. Meanwhile, most re-purposed industrial and consumer UV-C boxes are costly, bulky, or would never fit in a dispensing area.
Earlier in 2021, UVClean was honored with a coveted CES 2021 Innovation Award. The award recognized outstanding design and engineering in consumer technology products across 28 product categories.
ZEISS partnered with Voxelight LLC and Trig to develop the ZEISS UVClean. As experts in UV radiation, Voxelight contributed valuable insight into the design by harnessing the power of UV-C and safety requirements. Trig provided industrial design and development services, including product rendering and video animation. This is the second award-winning collaboration between ZEISS, Voxelight, and Trig, who previously won awards for the ZEISS C-UVProtect tablet in 2019.