Improvised face masks

Siddarth Gupta
SID07 Designs came up with a small innovation to ease things a little bit for our warriors on the field, the emergency workers, especially the doctors who have to sometimes work for over 20 hours continuously. We are calling this innovation Mask Buddy.
Mask Buddy helps to convert your usual behind the ear elastic mask into a comfortable one. This not only makes it easier to wear the mask for longer duration but also ensures you don’t have to constantly touch the mask directly or its elastic to adjust it, ease it or remove it, which protects you even more from accidentally contaminating your hands with the corona-virus particles which could be present outside your mask if you were exposed to a contaminated environment. It is a reusable plastic band that latches onto the two elastic strings of the surgical mask behind the head so that there is no need to hook these elastic strings behind the ears. There are two levels of adjustments available for different sized heads as well. This way it protects the back of the ears from the friction and wear that is present when wearing the normal surgical mask. It can be reused after cleaning with an alcohol based liquid sanitizer as well.
As attested by more than 10 doctors who we talked to, the normal surgical masks with over ear elastic strings cause earache, headaches and even pressure blisters on the back of the ears when worn over long periods of time. This tiny little attachment ensures that the elastic string does not put any kind of strain on the ears so that our doctors can focus on saving lives without any unnecessary distractions or discomfort.
While the world is busy 3D printing things, we made these using thin but strong plastic sheets cut from folders files (see following image) manually. We are able to produce 100 times the number of such bands using this method compared to what we would have achieved with our currently broken FDM 3D printer. Talk about “necessity is the mother of invention”. We would be making more of these and providing them to our doctors working in various hospitals in Jammu.
About SID07 Designs
We develop novel solutions, in the form of physical and tangible products to problems faced by the masses. We believe in bringing a sustainable positive change by making lives easier, healthier and happier by identifying unstructured problems or pain points in the society and solving these problems through engineering. Till date we have made eleven inventions in the fields of automotive tooling, wearable technology for health and wellness, hydraulic pipes and fittings, dust extraction for hand held and bench top tooling, plastic waste management and bio waste management and more. One out of these inventions is patent pending and three are registered patents in India.

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