To address shortages of pediatric Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, BME students from both UNC and NC State have crafted more than 1,000 pediatric facemasks for UNC Health in just over a week.
BME Interim Chair Dr. Paul Dayton is coordinating teams of engineers to tackle several COVID-19-related projects, including addressing the need for smaller masks to fit patients at the NC Children’s Hospital. “The BME department is well-positioned to help in these needs, and we are enthusiastic about working with our colleagues at UNC Health, FastTraCS, BeAM (the makerspace), as well as other departments and local industry to make an immediate impact in improving lives,” said Prof. Dayton.
The pediatric mask design team was led by BME teaching assistant professor Devin Hubbard, who is also lead design engineer at NC TraCS Institute. Hubbard and his design student team, Emiley Joyce and Nicole Wiley, developed a way to repurpose adult sized masks into pediatric sizes by folding and then thermally re-bonding them. Two shifts of BME students, including Christian Griffith, Phil Durham, Lindsay Sullivan, Joanna Lee, Ryan Chen, Kyle Meek, and Anthony Kostov, have worked in the BME department design lab to manufacture the masks. To read the full news, visit UNC Health website here.