It’s gospel in the startup community that opportunity is proportionate to pain. The worse a problem, the thinking goes, the bigger the market to solve it.

For the past two years, Northwestern grads Mert Iseri, 25, and Yuri Malina, 23, have trained their sights on one of health care’s biggest pain points: clean hands.

“Hospitals currently do manual observation, so nurses will get a pen and paper and sit in a corner of the room,” Iseri says. “It’s not accurate. It’s terrible.”

Enter SwipeSense, an electronic way to track whether hands are getting washed — and infections are getting prevented.

Learn more about SwipeSense’s business and the challenges it faces here, at Chicago Grid.