Design and Additive Manufacturing of Medical Face Shield for Healthcare Workers Battling Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for specific medical equipment such as personal protective equipment (PPE) has rapidly exceeded the available supply around the world. Specifically, simple medical equipment such as medical gloves, aprons, goggles, surgery masks and medical face shields have become highly in demand in the healthcare sector in face of this rapidly developing pandemic. This difficult period strengthens the social solidarity by an extent parallel to the escalation of this pandemic. Education and government institutions, commercial and non‑commercial organisations and individual home makers have produced specific medical equipment by means of additive manufacturing (AM) technology which is the fastest way to create a product, providing their support for urgent demands within the healthcare services. Medical face shields have become a popular item to produce and many design variations and prototypes have been forthcoming. Although AM technology can be used to produce several types of non‑commercial equipment, this rapid manufacturing approach is limited by its longer production time as compared to conventional serial/mass production and the high demand. However, most of the individual designer/maker-based face shields are designed with little appreciation of clinical needs and non‑ergonomic. They also lack of professional product design and are not designed according to additive manufacturing (DfAM) principles. Consequently, production time of up to 4-5 hours for some products of these designs are needed. Therefore, a lighter, more ergonomic, single frame medical face shield without extra components to assemble would be useful, especially for individual designers/makers and non‑commercial producers to increase productivity in a shorter timeframe. In this study, a medical face shield which is competitively lighter, relatively more ergonomic, easy to use and can be assembled without extra components (such as elastic bands, softening materials and clips) was designed. The face shield was produced by AM with relatively shorter production time. Subsequently, finite element analysis-based structural design verification was performed and a three-dimensional (3D) prototype was produced by an OEM 3D printer (Fused Deposition Modelling). This study demonstrated that an original face shield design with less than 10 g material usage per single frame was produced in under 45 minutes of fabrication time. This research also provides a useful product design for additive manufacturing of simple medical equipment such as face shields through advanced engineering design, simulation and additive manufacturing applications as an essential approach to battling coronavirus-like viral pandemics.