Documents personal protective equipment 223 results

"Objectives:
To assess prevalence of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)-related symptoms and adverse reactions during Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemics.
Methods:
We conducted an observational study among people exposed to various degree of infectious risk. Data were collected with a self-administered online questionnaire.
Results:
The entire cohort complained about a wide range of adverse reactions: respiratory symptoms affected 80.3% of respondents, 68.5% referred pressure-related skin lesions, fewer manifested a dermatosis of different grade or ocular symptoms. Most of the affected individuals belonged to healthcare staff and manifestations were predicted by wearing time (more than 6 h/d). Moreover, symptoms were higher in the healthcare staff wearing N95/FFP2 respirator mask.
Conclusions:
Given the crucial role of PPE to contain the pandemic infection, more attention has to be paid to exposed categories, establishing preventive measure of side effects to ensure total safety."

"The prediction of physiological strain is essential for the safety of personnel in high-risk environments especially when wearing personal protective equipment (PPE). This study aimed to develop a usability-enhanced variant of the Heat Strain Decision Aid (HSDA), named HSDA-FL, by implementing automatic workload estimations, alternative environmental inputs, and a revised initialization delay logic. The second aim was to evaluate whether these modifications preserved the original model's validity. The third aim was to evaluate the performance of HSDA, HSDA-FL, and the PHS-FL models while wearing CBRN PPE. Eleven acclimatized participants completed a 40-minute simulated chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) reconnaissance scenario involving walking and inspection tasks. The HSDA-FL was tested with both the original and the revised delay logic, demonstrated significantly lower residual errors than the original HSDA (p<0.001), with the revised delay logic variant achieving the highest accuracy (MAE=0.151°C, RMSE=0.191°C, bias=0.011°C). In contrast, the PHS-FL performed significantly worse than all HSDA-based models (p<0.001). These findings confirm that HSDA-FL maintains and slightly exceeds the predictive validity of the original HSDA while improving usability, whereas PHS-FL was not deemed sufficiently reliable for use with CBRN clothing."