New Prototype Of N95 Mask In The Works

The N95 mask has been the industry standard in personal protective equipment (PPE) since 1972. At first, they were designed for industrial use but were adapted for healthcare after virus blocking technology (originally developed to block tuberculosis) was introduced to the platform in 1995 by Peter Tsai, a professor at the University of Tennessee. When the pandemic hit, Professor Tsai came out of retirement to help come up with a way to decontaminate the masks.

The masks are proven to be very good at blocking viruses, but ask anyone wearing one for an extended period of time and they’ll tell you how hard it is to breathe in them. Studies say that while they protect against the inhalation of dangerous particles, they can also reduce the amount of oxygen by up to 20%.

Enter John Xu, a mechanical engineer at Stanford’s Nanoscale Prototyping Laboratory. He, along with a team of researchers and engineers at Stanford University are developing an attachment to the mask that produces oxygen from water by electricity.

The technology behind this borrows ideas from research on fuel cells that would someday power environmentally friendly cars.

This development would make wearing the large masks more comfortable so people wouldn’t mind them as much. This in turn would reduce the chance of cross contamination, as the wearer wouldn’t have to remove the mask to catch their breath as often.

Source:

Scientific American