ABSTRACT
The need for personal protective equipment rapidly grew during the COVID-19. Companies had to face problems related to their products' sustainability, adherence, and comfortability. Designing a face mask with proper adherence and comfortability in wearing and breathing became a matter of great importance. In this work, the adherence of an innovative face mask and its comfortability were experimentally tested with real faces, considering the deformation of the mask and the soft facial tissues. A stereophotogrammetric acquisition was made of the face with the face mask during these tests. A comparison between the geometries of the face and the mask, undeformed and deformed, gave the respective deformations. The force applied by the mask to the face was calculated, measuring the elastic strain of the mask bands during wearing and the deformation.
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic started in March 2020, the need for personal protective equipment rapidly grew as it became mandatory. The availability of a set of faces can be of great utility in designing a face mask with proper adherence and comfortability in wearing and breathing. A 3D geometry of a face with user-defined anthropometric measures was generated with Blender, a powerful development tool for creating 3D images. Using 3D Facial Norms, a free online database, it was possible to compute the mean anthropometric measures for the age groups of 17-20, 20-30, and 30-40 years old and then generate the respective faces for both genders. The adherence of an innovative face mask was then simulated with the reverse engineering software considering both the face mask and the faces rigid.
