A recent article [1] states a Swedish hospital might ban Crocs shoes (all-plastic clogs) to avoid static interference. They do not cite any specific failures or severe problems with static charge, but they're concerned enough to consider banning these particular shoes. This article caught the attention of a few folks here, and we thought about running some experiments to see how bad of a problem we have in our hospital environments, but we're not exactly sure of what experiments we should/could run to determine if we have a problem, how bad of a problem we have, and what shoe types are of most concern. Got any ideas? =20 Are there some simple tests we can run that measure static buildup (in Volts) on people wearing different footwear? Is there a simple way of characterizing the relative performance of different footwear (e.g., ability to build charge more than other shoes)? We have thousands of pieces of medical equipment that might be susceptible to static electricity. Any ideas how we can non-destructively test the equipment? Thanks, Pat Zabinski [1] We believe the original article was published in The Local (http://www.thelocal.se/). A copy can be found at http://www.wcsh6.com/printfullstory.aspx?storyid=3D58243. ------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from si-list: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field or to administer your membership from a web page, go to: //www.freelists.org/webpage/si-list For help: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'help' in the Subject field List technical documents are available at: http://www.si-list.net List archives are viewable at: //www.freelists.org/archives/si-list or at our remote archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/si-list/messages Old (prior to June 6, 2001) list archives are viewable at: http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu