ABSTRACT
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased the usage of various types of face masks. In addition, it triggered the rapid manufacture of new production lines of masks to cope with the unprecedented demand to overcome worldwide shortages. Such masks, which were previously used mostly by the health care personnel, became a daily necessity to the greater mainstream population. This rapid and sudden increase in their usage and the fact that new masks' innovations are progressively emerging to meet the growing global shortage requires an ongoing analysis on the factors associated with the fit and comfort while using these masks. Methods: This paper presents the first translation and validation of the R-COMFI questionnaire to evaluate the comfort of a newly developed filtering face-piece respirator by the research team at the University of Antwerp. The questionnaire, which consists of 3 sections: Discomfort, General wearing experience, and Function, was translated from English to Arabic and involved 43 participants in the Lebanese Red Cross healthcare field based in Lebanon. Results: The results showed discomfort factors that are mostly related to breathability and sweating caused by mask usage. Additionally, the results revealed that female respondents found the mask significantly less comfortable than male respondents (p-value with the two-tailed test is 0.0319), which confirmed that future validations should consider the concerns of both genders, and validated the R-COMFI translation exercise detailed in this paper. Discussion: The contribution of this paper can be pinned down into three findings. The first finding is related to the discomfort issues. The second finding highlighted a significant difference in comfort experience between females and males. The last finding is the translation validation of the R-COMFI instrument, which confirmed that the questionnaire can be applied among wider geographical locations.
ABSTRACT
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic presented European hospitals with chronic shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as surgical masks and respirator masks. Demand outstripped the production capacity of certified European manufacturers of these devices. Hospitals perceived emergency local manufacturing of PPE as an approach to reduce dependence on foreign supply. The fact of a pandemic does not circumvent the hospital's responsibility to provide appropriate protective equipment to their staff, so the emergency production needed to result in devices that were certified by testing agencies. This paper is a case study of the emergency manufacturing of respirator masks during the first month of the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and is separated into two distinct phases. Phase A describes the three-panel folding facepiece respirator design, material sourcing, performance testing, and an analysis of the folding facepiece respirator assembly process. Phase B describes the redevelopment of individual steps in the assembly process.
ABSTRACT
In order to support the decision-making process of industry on how to implement Augmented Reality (AR) in production, this article wants to provide guidance through a set of comparative user studies. The results are obtained from the feedback of 160 participants who performed the same repair task on a switch cabinet of an industrial robot. The studies compare several AR instruction applications on different display devices (head-mounted display, handheld tablet PC and projection-based spatial AR) with baseline conditions (paper instructions and phone support), both in a single-user and a collaborative setting. Next to insights on the performance of the individual device types for the single mode operation, the study is able to show significant indications on AR techniques are being especially helpful in a collaborative setting.
