Innovation on Preventing the Covid-19 Spread Using "Cool" Personal Protec-tive Clothing for Healthcare Workers

Abstract

Healthcare workers need Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that can protect them, to be safer and more comfortable with handling COVID-19 patients. One important PPE is the Personal Protective Clothing (PPC), where the PPC design has to comply with regulatory requirements, in terms of application, safety, comfort, and cost. A disadvantage is that PPC can be hot and poorly ventilated. The objective of innovation research was to developed a new design of PPC with safe, cool, and comfortable personal protective clothing. PPC is made with 100% polyester coverall according to WHO standards and with ice pack design. This product was subse-quently analyzed for material morphology and penetration (water-repel-lent). Further, relevant information was captured from 14 participants in several health professions, using questionnaires. The laboratory test re-sults of the sample materials reportedly surpassed the specifications and were also incorporated into level-3 PPC. Based on the survey data, the per-sonal protective clothing with ice pack was simple, comfortable, and not hot to use for healthcare workers.