Startup Spotlight: LOOEY™ – A Simple Shield for Safer, Cleaner Care; The Clear Solution to Stop the Splash

LOOEY™ is hospital-born from CEO + Founder (and RN, BSN!) Sarah Waimon.  Sarah’s journey as an entrepreneur began when her career as a caregiver met an urgent need. While working in a colorectal post-operative care unit, she experienced firsthand the risks of splash-back during routine cleaning procedures while rinsing a patient’s colostomy bag—a moment that sparked her mission to “stop the splash.” That real-world experience became the foundation for her innovation, LOOEY™: a transparent barrier that protects healthcare workers and patients from exposure to infectious fluids during routine bedpan (and other) rinses.

Guided by her deep empathy for frontline caregivers and a commitment to workplace safety, Sarah established Waimon Innovations to be a voice for nurse-led problem-solving in medical technology. Her leadership reflects a new generation of clinician-inventors who combine compassion with ingenuity to make healthcare safer, cleaner, and more human-centered.

In healthcare settings, many safety risks are accepted as “just part of the job.” LOOEY™ is doing something different — tackling a mundane but dangerous hazard head-on (or, face-first…).  Nurses sustain the largest percentage of bodily fluid exposures (BFE)  during their routine course of duty, with little-to-no updates in janitorial procedure/protocol in decades or more, leaving current standard procedure is less than optimal.

And BFE is more than simply unpleasant–its an operational hazard and financial burden for the healthcare system.  More than 3M healthcare workers exposed to occupational blood and bodily fluids annually in the US alone; and the cost of BFE is roughly $6,000 USD ranging up to $1M USD for a single BFE incident if an employee contracts a blood-borne disease. And what's worse–due to operational strain, inconvenience, and sheer impracticality, just 8% of Staff report using the appropriate PPE when handling bodily fluids.

With the aforementioned factors in mind, it's clear that a better solution is needed.  The current operational practice for bedpan rinsing is to don PPE and use the toilet-attached spray nozzles which are commonplace in virtually all US hospitals.  Except there’s one key problem: hospital toilets differ greatly from household toilets—not only in design, but in particular as it pertains to plumping, hookup, and water pressure.  A standard household toilet (along with other standard household items such as faucets, appliances, etc) uses ~40PSI.  However hospital toilets operate with ~80PSI–double the pressure that you’d experience in a household setting.  You can imagine the splash-back implications when executing a bedpan cleaning with 80PSI spraying out of the toilet-attached sprayer nozzle.

Splash-back poses a serious material threat to frontline workers executing these tasks.  A striking statistic to understand: just 18 viral particles can make a person sick.  Bear in mind that a single sneeze contains millions viral particles.  To put it bluntly: a single contaminated liquid droplet is more than enough to infect a worker.

How the Product Works + Why It Matters

LOOEY™ is a transparent shield that easily attaches to standard bedpan washers, providing caregivers with reliable protection against hazardous splash-back.  It is reusable, cleanable, and designed to withstand hospital-grade disinfectants; mindfully-built for everyday clinical use.  Its design provides immediate protection, and automatic compliance, reducing risk to caregivers and improving patient-care hygiene.  On the hospital operations side, LOOEY will save hospitals $345,000 each year* on discarded reusable measuring containers (*based on a 100 bed hospital model)

NEMIC + LOOEY™ - Market + Opportunity

Founder Sarah Waimon is a graduate and fellow of the NEMIC MedTech Leadership Program (2024-2025 Cohort), as well as the 2025 NEMIC Accelerator, our intensive 6-month business accelerator geared towards Medical Technology, Healthcare Technology, and Digital Health solutions.  Sarah pitched and was voted People’s Choice 1st Place Winner at the 2025 Spring Pitch Night + Graduation.  Additionally, LOOEY™ won 1st Place Winner at Rhode Island Startup Week 2025 Pitch Competition, as well as 2nd Prize at the 2025 EforAll Pitch Competition.  

With guidance and business advisory from NEMIC, LOOEY™ continues to develop its target markets such as clinical care facilities — hospitals, post-operative units, long-term care — where bed-pan washers and similar rinse stations are in regular use. Because the product addresses a specific hazard (splash-back during rinse/disposal) it has strong B2B potential in institutional procurement. Given its Rhode Island roots, the startup has the advantage of proximity to Northeastern hospitals, regional networks, and a compact local ecosystem to pilot real-world adoption that is easily scalable worldwide.

LOOEY™ is currently seeking to raise $200,000 of a first-round $500k capital raise for use towards Tooling, Industrial Design, and Marketing/Distribution.  For more information and to explore the company, CONTACT LOOEY today; and be sure to follow the NEMIC BLOG for more innovative companies in the NEMIC pipeline!