Gainesville Engineer Helps Protect Health Workers With Mass-Produced New Mask

Battelle labs in rural Ohio is decontaminating n95 masks for health care workers as personal protective equipment remains in short supply amidst COVID-19. Granted emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, the lab runs a separate tent station for their decontamination efforts, which follow tight structures and protocol.

In the UK, universities are playing a role in containing the coronavirus and helping communities cope by creating innovative solutions and using of technology to expand access. From converting shipping containers into vertical farms that provide food to those experiencing homelessness to teaching businesses how to move their work online, "universities are using their research and resources to improve people’s lives."

Skiers and snowboarders are donating their used snow goggles to be repurposed as personal protective equipment during the coronavirus. Helping to address a need nationwide, the snow-sport community is "providing an instant improvised answer to a critical shortage," while ski companies are also pitching in by donating KN95 respirator masks.

In Minnesota, hospitals in the Allina Health system are using tablets and stands for doctors to speak with their patients in an effort to cut down on the need to use various kinds of personal protective equipment like masks and gloves. With the tablets, doctors and nurses can virtually check in on patients nearby from the safety of a kiosk.

Dozens of tech-focused volunteers have come together to create Project N95, a personal protective equipment clearinghouse meant to connect health institutions in need of equipment like masks with suppliers around the world. This central marketplace aims to bridge the two parties in a single place along an otherwise complex supply chain.

A drone company and Kentucky Homeplace, a University of Kentucky initiative to address rural health, have used drones to deliver personal protective equipment packages to isolated, rural homes that can become inaccessible by road flooding or other bad weather. The flights, called the Jericho Project, so far have served as tests that the sponsors hope will lead to deliveries of medicine and other necessities during natural disasters or simply to speed delivery in remote areas.

Across the country, 3D manufacturers sprang into action in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to create a medical supply chain to fill gaps in hospitals' access to needed products like face shields and nasal swabs. Through networking and crowdsourcing, small manufacturers with 3D printers linked with shipping and product assembly teams that formed to meet the emergency need. The focus was on products that did not need elaborate testing to be proven safe and effective.

Medical professionals are facing mass shortages of personal protective equipment amid the coronavirus pandemic, so people with 3D printers are helping to produce alternatives. In New York, one company is using a GoFundMe campaign to help fund the production, while the founder of a Czech 3D-printer company developed one of the most downloaded designs for the transparent disposable full-face masks.

In Hong Kong, a newly devised e-health system is teaching patients how to test and monitor their own symptoms during the coronavirus pandemic, rather than have a doctor administer in-person care. Using an exhibition center as the treatment facility, patients with mild symptoms are admitted and then taught "how to check their own vital signs and input the data into the system," which helps limit the contact they have with anyone else.

SwipeSense is a monitoring technology adapted to track people’s movements as a form of contact tracing for Covid-19 in hospitals. Staff wear the device while at work, which uses sensors and location beacons to track movements, and when a positive Covid-19 test arises the hospital can quickly identify and quarantine those exposed to limit further spread. After adopting the device, and combined with other sanitation strategies, an Illinois hospital's staff infection rate dropped from 17% in March to less than 1% in June. Some have expressed privacy and security concerns with monitoring people’s movements.