Mask Ear Strain Reliever

A face-mask strain reliever specifically designed for simplicity and easy mass production through 3D printing and other methods including CNC cutters, laser cutting and routing.

The main aims of this project were to:

• Improve comfort when wearing face-masks, this should result in better discipline for keeping masks on and happier front-line medical staff.
• To improve the fit of the face-mask which should improve the protection with a better seal to the face.
• To improve the speed and variety of methods that the design can be manufactured by leading to more production units reaching more medical staff around the world.
• To enable people to distribute these easily wherever needed and help our front-line medical staff during these scary times.

My partner is an Occupational Therapist who has been using face masks constantly treating Covid-19 patients. Like many medics around the world she has found that these masks hurt her ears as well as not fitting very well for smaller head sizes. A lot of medical staff are currently using paperclips to help with this and I wanted to see if I could improve on that with my engineering background. I have been looking at the various great solutions on here and felt I could make a more production efficient solution borrowing aspects from many and applying my knowledge of 3D printing and industrial design.

This simple design is the short-term culmination of this, it has been tested and iterated through 4 versions to get the dimensions as efficient as I believe is necessary.

Please do distribute as many of these as you can to those you feel will benefit from them. I am keeping track of how many have been sent out so please let me know if you do, I’d love to hear of any small contribution we have made in the fight against Coronavirus.

At the bottom of this page you can find a cost and time breakdown if you want to make these yourself, they are extremely cheap to make and have the potential to be made in the thousands quickly.