Researchers have created a transparent face mask to make the interactions between healthcare workers and patients more personable as 55% of communication is visual.
An intensive care nurse working in London, who is profoundly deaf, told the BBC she had one experience where a patient, who also had hearing loss, was not able to understand her or her colleagues when they were explaining a procedure. The patient could not give consent and the procedure could not go ahead. “[Clear masks] would make things a lot easier for me,” she said.
Face masks, it seems, will be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. They’re compulsory on public transport in many places, and in some countries, and, of course, they’ve been crucial for medical professionals.
But, health benefits aside, there are concerns about some of the possible side-effects of this new reality, ranging from the impact on child development for young people who can’t see adults’ facial expressions to nurses reporting that earing a mask increases patients’ fears about treatment.
To get rid of such problems after a long period of research, the scientists adopted a technique called electro-spinning, which enabled them to use nanofibres less than 1,000th of the width of human hair to produce a transparent surgical mask.
The Clear Mask is the first transparent mask with full-face visibility. A smart, comfortable mask can be providing assured protection. Through the mask’s anti-fogging, see-through protective shield this blocks aerosols, fluids and sprays from our faces and meets ASTM level 3 standards for fluid resistance and flammability.
The mask is disposable, biodegradable and made from biomass material which can obviously meet the challenge of breathing and filtering out viruses and bacteria. One can clean it easily by using a little washing up soap to stop the plastic screen from fogging up.
Some 466 million people around the world who have disabling hearing loss, 34 million of those are children under the age of 15, according to the World Health Organization.
The basic aim of these transparent masks is to allow deaf and hearing-impaired people to read the lips of someone speaking to them. They are also very useful for autistic people, people with learning difficulties and small children who might be scared of masks or need to be able to see facial expressions.
