A feasible route for the design and manufacture of customised respiratory protection through digital facial capture.
Sci Rep
; 11(1): 21449, 2021 11 02.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1500502
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.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Photogrammetry
/
Face
/
Personal Protective Equipment
Type of study:
Cohort study
/
Observational study
/
Prognostic study
/
Qualitative research
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
Sci Rep
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
S41598-021-00341-3
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