One of the important reasons for the rapid spread of the COVID-19 across the globe is due to the lack of availability of Personal Protecting Equipments (PPEs) such as hand gloves, protective coverage, masks, face shield etc. Even though very limited PPE’s are available in the market, due to zooming up of the price to an extent of 10-15 times, these are out of reach of the common people. Moreover, complete lock down of the industries, manufacturing in large scale is also not possible. Because of the non availability of the face shields, Police personnel and health workers who are directly dealing with COVID-19 infected patients are at high risk.
In view of solving this problem to the possible extent, NITK Surathkal has came out with a simple solution through developing Economical, reusable, transparent face shields using locally available and low cost materials. Dr.Arun M. Isloor, Professor and Head at Dept. of Chemistry, NITK Surathkal is supervising a team of few volunteers of NITK Surathkal for preparing such low cost Face shield. “For making these type of Transparent face shields, it costs maximum of Rs12! ” said Prof Isloor.
As part of the first phase, 300 such face shields were released by Prof K. Uma Maheshwar Rao, Director of NITK on 9th May 2020 and were handed over to Mrs SindhuRoopesh, District Commissioner, Dakshina Kannada as part of NITK’s step towards COVID-19 fight. While releasing, Prof Rao said “ NITK is actively involved in fight against COVID-19 and assisting district administration and society through various activities such as Free distribution of Hand sanitizer, 3D printed facial mask etc”. Deputy Drug controller of D.K, Shri Ramakanth, Additional Drug controller Shri Shankar Naik, Registrar Shri K. Ravindranth, Dean faculty welfare Prof. M.S Bhat, Joint Registrar Shri Y. Ramomohan, Dr. Lakshmi, Research scholars & volunteers Mr Praveen and Mr Syed Ibrahim were present during the event.
“I have used a yoga mat, polyester transparent sheet, a synthetic adhesive and welcrove tape for these face shields. These could be used at least 90-100 days and can be reused just by giving soap water wash or using 3-4 droplets of hand sanitizer” said Prof Isloor. During the mid of March he saw his Malaysian collaborators were wearing face shields made of an elastic band, which was not only expensive but inconvenient for wearing it long time. One late evening Dr Isloor observed his 7 year old son was playing with his small yoga mat, which suddenly made him to think strip of yoga mat for this face shield.One can recollect that, Dr Isloor, who is actively involved in production and distribution of Hand sanitizer, recently who presented the prototype ZRO COV, an Ultraviolet radiation based disinfection chamber. Soon after the reports from NITK, few other government organizations including DRDO, IITs have reported similar prototypes.