Curved-crease origami face shields for infection control.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created enormous global demand for personal protective equipment (PPE). Face shields are an important component of PPE for front-line workers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing protection of the face from splashes and sprays of virus-containing fluids. Existing face shield designs and manufacturing procedures may not allow for production and distribution of face shields in sufficient volume to meet global demand, particularly in Low and Middle-Income countries. This paper presents a simple, fast, and cost-effective curved-crease origami technique for transforming flat sheets of flexible plastic material into face shields for infection control. It is further shown that the design could be produced using a variety of manufacturing methods, ranging from manual techniques to high-volume die-cutting and creasing. This demonstrates the potential for the design to be applied in a variety of contexts depending on available materials, manufacturing capabilities and labour. An easily implemented and flexible physical-digital parametric design methodology for rapidly exploring and refining variations on the design is presented, potentially allowing others to adapt the design to accommodate a wide range of ergonomic and protection requirements.
Competing Interests: The authors of this manuscript have read the journal’s policy and have the following competing interests: we disclose here that HappyShield is our CE-marked design, which we have released open source on https://happyshield.github.io/en/, licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International” License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). We do not intend to gain financially from the release of this face shield design. A disclaimer for the design is provided at https://happyshield.github.io/en/. All others producing face shields based on the designs presented in this paper remain responsible for undergoing any necessary testing and obtaining any necessary approvals before manufacturing and distributing face shields. No patent application has been made for this design. No further modified versions of the design are currently under active development. Any future versions of the design presented in this paper developed by the authors will also be released open-source under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. The funding that supported this work is listed in the acknowledgements.