Jackson Masters

Covid Face Shield

As was true for many others, the early days of the pandemic found me feverishly refreshing apnews.com, counting rolls of toilet paper and spraying anything that came near me with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. After a few days of mandatory isolation, I, like many others, felt an almost overpowering urge to "do something" about what was happening.

So, when Jason Trachewsky (CEO of the smart logistics startup where I worked at the time) called to tell me that we had been asked to join a group Kaiser Permanente was putting together, I jumped at the chance.

Kaiser asked us to propose ways of jumpstarting domestic production of face shields, and we set off to design a product that would fulfill the following requirements:

1) The shield must support rapid scaling to mass production, ideally with multiple manufacturing methods.

2) The shield must function when made from as wide a range of materials and material thicknesses as possible to circumvent shortages.

3) The shield must be easily adjustable and support users either bare-headed or wearing full isolation suits while still being secure enough to resist shifting during movement.

4) The shield must be inexpensive enough to be considered disposable and sufficiently durable to withstand repeated use and sterilization if possible.

5) The shield should require minimal assembly and must not use elastic parts.

6) The shield must be flatly packable.

While I started prototyping, Jason reached out to Malachy Moynihan (an expert in domestic and international manufacturing.) Who proved to be an invaluable resource whenever I ran into a question and who spent many hours patiently poking holes in some of my less practical ideas.

After demonstrating our hand-cut prototypes, Kaiser asked us to make a batch for field trials with our local hospital as quickly as possible.

Malachy connected us with Diego Solank, who (in addition to suggesting many improvements to the overall design) opened his shop to us. He and I spent a day frantically iterating through all the minor issues that always seem to arise as soon as you think a design is nearly ready.

We posted our design files to all the open-source COVID-19 repositories we could find, made up a large batch, sterilized them, and delivered them to the local Kaiser hospital.

As fate would have it, Apple announced they had been developing a similar mask and were already making millions daily. If someone’s going to beat you to market, it's comforting to lose to the best.

Despite not being adopted by Kaiser, our mask garnered a lot of interest in the forums and repositories of open-source Covid-19 PPE, and the knowledge that other people could use the design made the whole effort feel worthwhile.