Novel combined shield design for eye and face protection from COVID-19

Huang, Xiu-Ling; Yang, Jin-Rong; Sun, Yu-Xiang; Chen, Yi-Wen; Wang, Xiu-Mei; Du, Shui-Miao; Hua, Zi-Kai

The World Health Organization emphasized the importance of goggles and face shields for protection of medical personnel at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unsurprisingly, almost all countries suffered from a critical supply shortage of goggles and face shields, as well as many other types of personal protective equipment (PPE), for a long period, owing to the lack of key medical material supplies and the inefficiency of existing fabrication methods arising from the need to avoid crowds during the outbreak of COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a novel combined shield design for eye and face protection that can be rapidly fabricated using three-dimensional printing technology. The designed prototype eye-face shield is accessible to the general public, offering more possibilities for yield improvement in PPE during emergent infectious disease events such as COVID-19.