Who hasn’t experienced the shudder of apprehension before entering a gas station bathroom? The only thing worse is the wave of revulsion after entering: All too often, public restrooms are a frightful mess—to put it euphemistically.
That mess can extend to the toilet seat itself, which leads to contortions to avoid touching it regardless of whether the seat is up or down.
To help remedy this situation, a group of mechanical engineering students at MIT and Boston University have created a hydrophobic, antimicrobial toilet seat that stays up when not in use.
The concept for such a product started during the Covid pandemic. “People had this high awareness of hygiene,” said Richard Li, a graduate student at MIT. “And a university is a place where messy things happen—people don’t lift the toilet seat when they’re using. We were thinking, ‘What would be the easiest way to address this problem?’”
There are many self-cleaning toilets on the market, they found. Some spin the seat under a disinfection device, others have a shelf-like washer extend over the seat between uses, others rotate a plastic covering on and off the seat after every use. But all of these had a dependence on electricity and a lot of moving parts unlikely to stand up to the attention of a drunken vandal alone in a locked stall.
“That’s why we interviewed a lot of facility managers and maintenance staff,” Li said, “and they really hate the cost and complexity of batteries and consumables.” He and his co-founders—Max Pounanov, Kevin Tang, and Andy Chang—founded Cleana to find a purely mechanical solution that would stand up to abuse, minimize maintenance, and obviate need for electrical outlets or the hassle of replacing batteries.
The purely mechanical is, of course, a large category, and Li and his team considered and prototyped many possibilities. Above all, they wanted a seat that would stay up on its own when not in use.
The solution was a bit too elegant, it turned out. “We ended up giving up on that because it was not manufacturable,” Li said. “It ended up being very difficult to make a hollow seat.”
After returning to the drawing board, they came up with a mechanism that uses a suction cup to keep the seat down once it’s lowered. After a user’s weight is removed, a stream of air slowly enters the cup until the pressure equalizes, the suction cup lets go, and the springs bring it to its waiting position. The researchers also made the seat antimicrobial to further raise the sanitation bar, and they added a handle so that no one would have to come in contact with the business surface of the seat while lowering it.
Finally, they had a prototype to test out in real bathrooms.
Read the whole story and how they accommodated the female needs in the link.