Project description
Innovative body dryer for people with reduced mobility
In hotels, gyms, hospitals and elderly residences, towel maintenance represents a significant portion of costs, consuming energy and water. As a consequence, reducing laundry costs is indispensable for the market. Hand dryer instruments represent a solution that eliminates the use of hand towels. However, there are no reliable devices for the replacement of body towels. The EU-funded BD Body Dryer project proposes an innovative solution that completely dries the human body in 1.5 minutes. The device consists of a column placed on the bathroom wall that produces hot air. Based on a bigger device tested in hotels and gyms, BD Body Dryer is designed for people with reduced mobility and for gyms.
Objective
Hotels, gyms, hospitals, and elderly residences depend on washing machines for towel maintenance, which requires water, electricity, and chemical substances. These institutions face an environmentally unsustainable situation with the use of water and electricity, without mentioning the laundry wastewater and expenses of billions of euros. In spite of similar technology used to reduce the use of towels in restrooms, the hand dryer devices; still, the use of the body towels remains invariable in the market due to inefficient devices and low-user acceptance.
In response, we have developed a unique premium body dryer able to completely dry the body within 1 min and a half, three times faster than the only two inefficient solutions in the market. Our product consists of a column held on the bathroom wall that generates warm air by a powerful engine hidden inside the tower. The warm air is delivered to the body by a central groove through descending movements of the turbine. The column mirror finished also integrates aromatherapy and color-therapy technologies for an end-user wellness unique experience.
Our product is designed to reach firstly the premium hotels market and gyms, a market that needs to reduce the towel use urgently. Indeed, BD Body Dryer will represent yearly savings of 65% of the laundry costs (estimated in €40k savings/year for a 200-room hotel). Because of the advantages of our technology, we also manufacture BD Body Dryer with a second non-mirrored wellness presentation (an slim model). This model is an assistive device for people with reduced mobility (our second target) and for the gyms. We have already protected our prototype with two patents and one utility model in the main Markets (Europe, USA, and Japan). Thus, after 5-year cumulative sales in these markets of 26,300 units sold, BD Body Dryer will give net revenues of ~€47.5M net profits of ~23M and, considering the investment of €1.5M an ROI of ~14.37 euro per euro invested.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
28006 MADRID
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.