The Challenge

Design easy-to-make medical protective equipment that teams of volunteers could manufacture, assemble, and ship within a day’s notice.

The Solution

Autoclave-safe face shields, single-piece isolation gowns cut from bulk material, and a set of semi-automated tools to fabricate surgical masks.

Our Goals

Easy-to-Source Materials

Many of the raw materials typically used to make medical gear were hard to find. Our designs needed to be adaptable to different materials if we needed to switch suppliers, and we were limited to the fabrication resources available at our makerspace.

We worked with local Tyvek and polypropylene suppliers to identify and evaluate multiple options for gown materials.

Quick to Produce

Hospitals were already low on PPE as we began the project, so we needed to devise ways to ramp up production and deliver orders in quantities of hundreds to thousands in less than a week turnaround.

Our face shield designs could be manufactured and produced more than 100 times faster than go-to 3D printed designs at the time.

Durability & Reuse

Since medical staff were expected to wear the same gear for their entire shift, our products needed to be comfortable enough to sustain extensive use, and ideally cleanable for reuse.

The reusable face shield we designed had adaptable comfort strips and could be cleaned in an autoclave.

Scalability

We needed a process that was easy to scale to larger volumes and other sites if needed, and flexible to the number of volunteers supporting the work at any given time.

Our Isolation Gowns initiative expanded into its own facility to meet the demand for gowns over the course of the summer.

Our Designs

Reusable Face Shields

I worked with another volunteer to create reusable face shields that would decrease disposable shield consumption and demand. Since the design is made from industry standard materials for sterilization via autoclave, UV, light, or bleach, hospitals could clean masks in bulk and reuse them.

We designed the visors to tesselate so they could be laser cut in bulk, meaning we could produce them 100 times faster than the 3D printed designs at the time, which were not intended for reuse.

We made over 3,000 reusable face shields.

See the product here.

Isolation Gowns

I designed the pattern and cutting jig for a single-piece gown design that could be cut from any medical-grade material. To make gowns in bulk, stacks of spunbond polypropylene were laid out and compressed beneath a wooden jig, and then cut with a fabric saw. The sleeves of each gown were bonded together before folding and shipping.

The process expanded into its own production facility to produce 30,000 gowns over the entire summer.

See the product here.

Pleating Machine

Each stage of the hand-cranked pleating machine pictured above progressively creases and flattens the pleats to produce a spool of pleated material. We designed the entire system to be modular so that we could update the machine as we refined our designs.

Mask Sealing Machine

This part of the mask-making setup takes pleated segments of polystyrene and heat-seals elastic bands onto them to form the ear loops of a finished mask.

Insights