NIOSH Fosters Respirator Improvements

A national competition aimed at creating respirator fit solutions is nearing completion. 

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health launched the Respirator Fitness Evaluation Challenge to encourage the business community to address respirator seal effectiveness and evaluation.

As emphasized during the coronavirus pandemic, the variation in face, shape, size, and dimensions of respirators makes it difficult to consistently form a strong seal or barrier between the wearer and the contaminated environment. 

Competition 

The three-phase, $350,000-competition to create a market-ready, user-friendly fit evaluation launched in January 2023.

Since then, nine winners have advanced to the final phase with their prototypes. 

Nine winners have advanced to the final phase with their prototypes.

The products incorporate innovative technologies that provide the wearer with immediate feedback about the fit of their facepiece. 

In the final phase of the competition, winners will submit a pre-production prototype for NIOSH evaluation. 

NIOSH choose up to three teams to receive a portion of the $150,000 prize in October. 

Phase Two Winners 

NIOSH outlined the phase two winners and their prototypes: 

• Consequent Labs: A novel solution to enable rapid, user-friendly, and highly-scalable respirator fit testing of professional users and the general public for both routine use and during public health emergencies.
• Tony Jiang: HIR utilizes humidity and a passive chemical indicator to determine respirator fit in real time.
• Mobomo: Fit & Breathe: Complete particulate filtering facepiece respirator management.
• MyMaskMovement: This innovation makes fit testing inclusive and accessible using a mobile app.
• Philip Neustrom: The FitTests4All Home Fit Testing Kit is an affordable respirator evaluation solution designed for both home and on-the-go use.
• OpenAeros LLC: OpenFT: A low-cost, open source, quantitative fit tester that pairs a unique non-destructive sampling probe with an open source condensation particle counter to deliver real time respirator fit measurement.
• Sungmee Park and Sundaresan Jayaraman: A fabric-based sensor network integrated into an N95 filtering face piece respirator monitors the fit of the respirator on the user continuously and unobtrusively, and provides alerts to the user when there is face seal leakage that could compromise the fit causing the respirator to no longer afford the degree of protection for which it has been designed.
• TruFIT LLC: TruFIT’s solution pioneers the development of fail-safe, visual and real-time fit indicators for facial personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks and respirators
• Richárd Ádám Vécsey and Axel Ország-Krisz, Team rixel: This solution is an AI assisted mobile application and its infrastructure to give immediate feedback for the user about the fit of the selected FFR.