I am currently trying to come up with an intuitive design for a touch free sink faucet that allows for both hot and cold temperature settings. Most touch free sinks involve one sensor to start the water flowing and you're stuck with whatever temperature comes out, which is usually just a mix of the two. After some research I found some designs incorporated a knob on the side to allow temperature settings, however in public restrooms a truly hands free design is strongly desired even if youre about to wash them, hence the invention of hands free soap dispensers even though it is putting sanitizing soap on your hands after touching it.
The initial design I thought of was something like this:
The user puts their hand over red sensor to start hot water, blue to start cold, both to start medium.
However, there are some obvious oversights:
- The sensors aren't in front of the faucet, so they will keep stopping forcing you to wave over them again.
- The "medium" setting is not very intuitive
To fix number one I added the middle black sensor, that way you activate the temperature states first by waving over the colored sensors, and then the water starts when you wave in front of the black one like typical hands-free faucets.
However, I believe this to be even less intuitive and too many steps to simply wash your hands.
So, are either of these designs intuitive or is there a more streamlined and easily understandable way to incorporate hot and cold functionality into a truly hands free faucet?