A system and method for monitoring hand washing or application of a disinfectant wherein a pattern recognition algorithm executed in a computer compares one or more digitized images of a person going through hand washing or disinfectant application motions with a reference set of images and creates a pass/fail report. The digitized image may be taken by a video camera and color quantified to reduce the amount of computing power required before clusters of pixels with similar color classifications are determined and shapes identified.