Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Carter, Luke N.
• Reed, Caroline A.
• Morrell, Alexander P.
• Fong, Anthony K. H.
• Chowdhury, Rayyan
• Miller, Ewan
• Alberini, Federico
• Khambay, Balvinder
• Anand, Shivana
• Grover, Liam M.
• Coward, Trevor
• Addison, Owen
• Cox, Sophie C.

Titel

A feasible route for the design and manufacture of customised respiratory protection through digital facial capture

Ist Teil von

• Scientific reports, 2021-11, Vol.11 (1), p.21449-21449, Article 21449

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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.