School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC 3220, Australia.
Car Advance, Ivanhoe, VIC 3079, Australia.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Dec 3;22(23):9463. doi: 10.3390/s22239463.
Personal protective equipment (PPE) is widely used around the world to protect against environmental hazards. With the emergence of the COVID-19 virus, the use of PPE domestically has increased dramatically. People use preventive and protective mechanisms now more than ever, leading to the important question of how protective is the PPE that is being used. Face masks are highly recommended or mandatory during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic due to their protective features against aerosol droplets. However, an issue faced by many users of face masks is that they are entirely manual, with users having to decide for themselves whether their mask is still protective or if they should replace their mask. Due to the difficulty in determining this, people tend to overuse masks beyond their optimal usage. The research presented in this paper is an investigation of the viability of integrating IoT sensors into masks that are capable of collecting data to determine its usage. This paper demonstrates the usage of humidity and temperature sensors for the purpose of determining a mask's usage status based on changes in these variables when a mask is put on and taken off. An evaluation was made on the usage of the two sensors, with the conclusion that a humidity sensor provides more accurate results. From this, we present a framework that takes into consideration the factors that affect a mask's performance, such as time, humidity and temperature, to calculate the life expectancy of a mask.
个人防护设备 (PPE) 在全球范围内被广泛用于防范环境危害。随着 COVID-19 病毒的出现，国内对 PPE 的使用急剧增加。人们现在比以往任何时候都更频繁地使用预防和保护机制，这就引出了一个重要问题，即正在使用的 PPE 的防护效果如何。由于面罩具有防止气溶胶飞沫的防护功能，因此在 COVID-19 大流行期间强烈建议或强制使用面罩。然而，许多面罩使用者面临的一个问题是，它们完全是手动的，使用者必须自己决定他们的面罩是否仍然具有防护作用，或者是否应该更换面罩。由于难以确定这一点，人们往往会过度使用口罩，超过其最佳使用期限。本文所介绍的研究是对面罩进行物联网传感器集成的可行性的调查，这种集成能够收集数据以确定其使用情况。本文展示了使用湿度和温度传感器来根据口罩佩戴和脱下时这些变量的变化来确定口罩使用状态的用途。对这两个传感器的使用情况进行了评估，结论是湿度传感器提供了更准确的结果。在此基础上，我们提出了一个框架，考虑了影响口罩性能的因素，如时间、湿度和温度，以计算口罩的预期寿命。
