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Abstract
The World Health Organisation has called for a 40% increase in personal protective equipment manufacturing worldwide, recognising that frontline workers need effective protection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Current devices suffer from high fit-failure rates leaving significant proportions of users exposed to risk of viral infection. Driven by non-contact, portable, and widely available 3D scanning technologies, a workflow is presented whereby a user’s face is rapidly categorised using relevant facial parameters. Device design is then directed down either a semi-customised or fully-customised route. Semi-customised designs use the extracted eye-to-chin distance to categorise users in to pre-determined size brackets established via a cohort of 200 participants encompassing 87.5% of the cohort. The user’s nasal profile is approximated to a Gaussian curve to further refine the selection in to one of three subsets. Flexible silicone provides the facial interface accommodating minor mismatches between true nasal profile and the approximation, maintaining a good seal in this challenging region. Critically, users with outlying facial parameters are flagged for the fully-customised route whereby the silicone interface is mapped to 3D scan data. These two approaches allow for large scale manufacture of a limited number of design variations, currently nine through the semi-customised approach, whilst ensuring effective device fit. Furthermore, labour-intensive fully-customised designs are targeted as those users who will most greatly benefit. By encompassing both approaches, the presented workflow balances manufacturing scale-up feasibility with the diverse range of users to provide well-fitting devices as widely as possible. Novel flow visualisation on a model face is presented alongside qualitative fit-testing of prototype devices to support the workflow methodology.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 21449 |
Journal | Scientific Reports |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2 Nov 2021 |
Keywords
- COVID - 19
- Healthcare
- Occupational Health
- biomedical engineering
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Dive into the research topics of 'A feasible route for the design and manufacture of customised respiratory protection through digital facial capture'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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COVID-19: Enhancing facemask effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic through the development of personalised additively manufactured PPE
Cox, S. (Principal Investigator) & Grover, L. (Co-Investigator)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council
1/05/20 → 30/04/21
Project: Research Councils