The device, called FaceBit, senses leaks and records wear time while continuously measuring a wearer’s heart and breathing rate. Its developers hope it will aid research and help health care workers and others who wear face coverings throughout the day to battle the transmission of diseases such as COVID.
Rather than developing an entire “smart mask,” which might be impractical to reuse, Hester’s team created an electronic device, a little larger than a quarter, that attaches to a face covering with a magnetic clip and contains several sensors. A pressure sensor detects leaks, indicating how well a mask is fitting. Pressure changes also let the FaceBit determine when the mask is over someone’s face, so it can record wear time and can enter “sleep” mode when idle.
But a fit monitor could be very useful for health care workers wearing a respirator all day during the current pandemic, says Lisa Brosseau, a research consultant at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, who was not involved in the FaceBit project. “We would all like to have this for every respirator—not just in health care—that would tell you continuously if you are achieving a good fit, or it would warn you if you were not,” she says.
Of course, such tests require resources and time that many people outside the health care space do not have. A monitor, even one that checked fit just once a day, could supplement the gold-standard tests, suggests Adam Finkel, an environmental health scientist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, who was not involved with the FaceBit project. “You had a good fit yesterday, but something’s different today,” he offers as an example.
Very scalable idea.
Cloth masks to nothing to stop the spread of viral particles. They actually increase viral spread by creating a medium for viruses to multiply
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