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 user going through hand washing or disinfectant application motions with a reference set of images and creates a pass/fail report. An input device, digitizer and computer used in monitoring hand washing or application of a disinfectant may also be used as part of a touchless identification system to authenticate the user wherein an image processing algorithm and a mathematical algorithm executed in the computer identifies the user based on data extracted from the user's digitized hand images.