Mask Ear Strain Reliever

thingiverse

A disposable face-mask strain reliever specifically designed for simplicity and easy mass production through 3D printing and other methods including CNC cutters, laser cutting and routing. The main aims of this project were to: - Improve comfort when wearing face-masks, which should result in better discipline for keeping masks on and happier front-line medical staff. - To improve the fit of the face-mask, which should improve protection with a better seal to the face. - To improve speed and variety of methods that the design can be manufactured by leading to more production units reaching more medical staff around the world. - To enable people to distribute these easily wherever needed and help our front-line medical staff during these challenging times. My partner, an Occupational Therapist, has been using face masks constantly treating Covid-19 patients. Like many medics around the world, she has found that these masks hurt her ears as well as not fitting very well for smaller head sizes. Many medical staff are currently using paperclips to help with this issue, and I wanted to see if I could improve on that with my engineering background. I have been looking at the various great solutions on here and felt I could make a more production-efficient solution by borrowing aspects from many and applying my knowledge of 3D printing and industrial design. This simple design is the short-term culmination of this, having been tested and iterated through four versions to get the dimensions as efficient as I believe necessary. IT IS ESSENTIAL TO STERILIZE them before distributing these to healthcare workers, as there are many ways to do this. I advise contacting those you plan to donate these to before producing any and getting guidance on how they would like them to be sterilized. It is recommended to avoid ABS as a material for these, as it has been reported to cause skin irritation from long-term exposure. Please distribute as many of these as you can to those who will benefit from them. I am keeping track of how many have been sent out and would love to hear about any small contribution we have made in the fight against Coronavirus. At the bottom of this page, you can find a cost and time breakdown if you want to make these yourself; they are extremely cheap to make and have the potential to be made in the thousands quickly. Update 07/04/2020: I have had requests for longer lengths to fit other variants of masks. I have added three longer variants of 120mm, 160mm, and 200mm long. I cannot test these with other types of masks, so please use your own judgment as to whether they are suitable or not. Update 08/04/2020: With great feedback from contributors to the project, we have iterated to a new version (V5). I have kept V4 files as a .zip in case anyone needs them. Changes include: - The addition of holes that allow semi-permanent fixing of elastic straps to the mask. A huge thanks and credit go to 'KD7LRJ' for creating this feature. - An increase of thickness from 0.5mm to 0.6mm, which should allow a wider variety of resolutions and nozzle sizes to print the design and make the end-products more reliable between printer models. Thank you again for your support and enthusiasm for this project; we are learning a lot every day! Update 11/04/2020: It's amazing to see how much passion people are approaching this with, thank you everyone for that! I have iterated the design to V6 with the following changes from great feedback, as usual, previous versions are still available in .zips: - The 160mm and 200mm version now has four hook points, adding one extra from the previous version. This should hopefully allow a greater variety of mask strap lengths to be used with them. - The radius of the hook curve has been increased from 0.5mm to 1.0mm, which should mean they catch in hair less and are less likely to poke holes in protective gloves. Please provide feedback if this change has indeed helped these! - The 28-set file now has separation of 0.5mm between units so will no longer lift off the print bed in one piece or be able to be 'snap-off'. This is a result of the change above, to have a more curved hook and avoid sharp edges units can no longer touch when printing or be snapped off. I will be releasing some contribution data tomorrow, so please let me know how many you have produced today if you want to be included in that list!