During the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for specific medical equipment such as personal protective equipment (PPE), has rapidly exceeded the available supply around the world. Most especially medical gloves, aprons, goggles, surgery masks and medical face shields have become the most demanded simple medical equipment for healthcare services in this rapidly developing pandemic. Resulting from this difficult period, social solidarity in the world has also rapidly increased as much as the pandemic. Education and governmental institutions, commercial and non‑commercial organisations and individual home makers have produced specific medical equipment by means of additive manufacturing (AM) technology as the fastest way to create a product, providing their support for urgent demands within the healthcare services. Medical face shields have become a popular item to produce and many individual design variations and prototypes have been forthcoming. Although a good number of non‑commercial equipment has been produced utilising AM technology and donated to the healthcare services, the biggest disadvantages of this rapid manufacturing approach appears to be the longer production time compared to conventional serial/mass production and the high demand. However, most of the individual designer/maker-based face shields are designed with little appreciation of clinical needs, are non‑ergonomic and exhibit a lack of professional product design and design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) principles. Consequently, production time of up to 4-5 hours for some products are experienced with these designs. Therefore, a lighter, more ergonomic, single frame medical face shield without extra components to assemble would be useful, most especially for individual designers/makers and non‑commercial producers in order to provide increased productivity in a shorter timeframe. In this study, a medical face shield which is competitively lighter, relatively more ergonomic, easy to use and can be assembled without extra components (such as elastic bands, softening materials and clips) and which has a relatively shorter AM based production time, was designed. Subsequently, finite element analysis based structural design verification was realised and a 3D prototype was produced through an OEM 3D printer (Fused Deposition Modelling). As the result of this study, an original face shield design, which can be produced in under 45 minutes fabrication time with less than 10 g material usage per single frame, was approved. This research provides a useful product design case study for informing further research on design and rapid prototyping of simple medical equipment such as face shields for battling coronavirus-like viral pandemics through advanced engineering design, simulation and additive manufacturing applications.
