A Bothell startup plans to come to market this year with a self-sanitizing keyboard that uses germicidal ultraviolet light to combat the spread of disease in hospitals.

Vioguard LLC, owned by two Microsoft Hardware alums and their business partners, sees its device as an alternative to manual cleaning. After use, the keyboard automatically retracts into an enclosed monitor stand to be bathed in the ultraviolet light.

Vioguard’s keyboard has relatively flat keys, more in the style of a notebook keyboard, to maximize the surface area exposed to the light. The keyboard rolls out smoothly from the enclosed casing when a user waves a hand in front of an embedded infrared sensor. That reduces the possibility of further contamination by cutting down on the need to touch the hardware.

“A large hospital might have 500 or 1,000 keyboards in patient care areas. That’s not counting keyboards in private offices,” said Craig Ranta, the company’s chief technical officer and a former Microsoft Hardware engineering director who worked on projects including the Surface tabletop computer. “It would take an army to clean these keyboards every day.”

Computers are becoming more common in hospitals because of electronic medical records, and shared keyboards are one of the major ways that disease can spread.

The Ultraviolet “Class C” light used by the Vioguard keyboard is a well-known germicide. Vioguard cites outside lab tests showing the effectiveness of its system in ridding highly contaminated keyboards of bacteria related to the deadly MRSA infection and other diseases in time spans as short as 10 seconds.

An estimated 1.7 million people become infected in U.S. health care facilities each year, and 99,000 people die as a result, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That results in billions of dollars in additional health-care expenses.

The lost lives and financial costs create “huge amounts of incentive to fix this problem,” said John Sharps, Vioguard’s vice president of development and manufacturing, who previously oversaw the development and launch of Microsoft Hardware’s webcam line.

Ranta initially explored the concept as a Microsoft Hardware engineer, but the Redmond company ultimately opted not to pursue the project.

After Ranta left Microsoft, he "got bored of being retired after about a month," and started thinking about the best ideas he had been involved with that hadn't been developed into products.

"I literally made a spreadsheet, WhatWillCraigDo.xls," he said. "I'm an engineer, I matrixed it all out."

The answer was the self-sanitizing keyboard. Vioguard expects to launch the first version of the keyboard in the second quarter of this year, starting with initial deployments at medical facilities in the Seattle region, said Ken Sullivan, vice president of sales and marketing.

Vioguard hasn’t finalized pricing, but it’s anticipating an initial range between $499 and $599 per keyboard. However, the company expects the price to decline over time, as the economies of large-scale manufacturing start to take effect.

The company is funded by the principals and angel investors. Its president and CEO is veteran investor Larry Ranta, who is Craig Ranta’s uncle.

Long term, the company is looking to expand beyond medical facilities into industrial settings, such as clean manufacturing facilities and food production lines where people use shared computers. Vioguard is also looking at other potential applications of UVC light on additional surfaces that can transmit disease.

Industry analyst Tim Bajarin, president of the Creative Strategies research firm in Campbell, Calif., said he sees potential for a self-sanitizing keyboard in everyday settings, as well, such as offices or homes.

“It always starts with the vertical markets when they’re bringing in something new like that,” Bajarin said. “But if the technology is effective, let’s hope it goes down to a price point that fits into a family’s budget, because germs are not isolated to hospitals.”