Shielding the community: MB teen creates PPE with 3D printer

When 16-year-old Meghan Goyal signed up for a 3-D printing class last year at The Altamont School, she never predicted that she would soon use those skills to print personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit the greater Birmingham area. Goyal didn’t want to sit at home. She wanted to help. She originally researched volunteer opportunities to pass out school lunches, but she was told that she wasn’t old enough.

Then she read an article about Bham Support that asked for volunteers to help make PPE for healthcare workers. She jumped on the opportunity to help; both her parents are doctors.

“When I read this, it really did hit close to home for me,” she said. “Birmingham is such a medically based community, and having both of my parents be in the medical field, it influenced me. And it’s made it even more rewarding.”

The face shield covers a person’s eyes, nose and mouth, while the N95 mask — which was in high demand when the coronavirus first broke out in Birmingham — only covers a person’s nose and mouth. The face shield is also more comfortable than an N95 mask, said John Olsen, cofounder of Bham Support.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been fit for an N95 mask, but it’s horrible,” he said. “They’re very constrictive and uncomfortable. And you really only wear them in a highly infectious environment, like when you have a patient with tuberculosis.”

N95s also aren’t perfect, Olsen said. N95 stands for 95% of particulate matter, 0.03 microns or larger. Coronavirus is a large virus, so the N95 will effectively filter this virus out, but at a 5% failure rate based on fit and other factors, Olsen said.

“Imagine, if you’re wearing an N95 mask, and a patient sneezes directly in your face, there’s a 5% chance — assuming it doesn’t get in your eyes — there’s still a 5% chance that you’re going to be exposed to the pathogen,” he said. “When you put a physical barrier between the patient and the health care provider, you feel much better about this.”

It’s pretty rare for healthcare providers to use face shields under normal circumstances, but it’s the perfect opportunity to support the limited supply of soft face masks with face shields, Olsen said.

“What we’re able to make, I’m saying is better than what they normally use,” he said. “These are durable, they’re engineered from the ground up to be chemically resistant, and they’re reusable. They can wipe them down.”

Goyal contacted Bham Support asking to volunteer, and she said they immediately sent her a file to print a face shield. She reached out to her computer science teacher and her principal at The Altamont School, and her computer science teacher told Goyal that she could bring a 3-D printer from the school to her house.

She has it set up downstairs and now prints about four face shields a day.

Goyal remembers how she felt when she printed her first face shield in early April. She said she felt relieved that the printer worked and that it came out right. The shield went to a doctor at UAB working on a clinical trial for a possible coronavirus treatment. He was working face-to-face with patients who had been tested positive for the coronavirus.

“He sent a picture of him wearing his mask,” she said. “And that was such a great feeling, to know, ‘Wow, I’m actually helping someone and protecting them.’”

With each face shield, Goyal includes a thank-you note with cleaning instructions and a request for feedback. So far, masks have been donated across the state, going as far as Tuscaloosa and Huntsville, and Goyal makes more every day.

The 3-D printing class she took last year was “just for fun,” but Goyal said she is now very grateful that she took it. It also steered her toward Girls Who Code, a group she leads at her school. In addition to 3-D printing, she and others in Girls Who Code practice laser cutting and coding, and they were working on building a website before school let out.

“I know there aren’t a lot of females in the computer science sector, so Girls Who Code is a really great program,” she said.

GETTING THE COMMUNITY INVOLVED

In addition to being a dad and a medical student, Olsen has spent the past year prototyping a learning module for grassroots manufacturing.

“I very early on thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to send this to China. I want this to be made in America.’” he said. “I believe there’s value to that, and I think this is something we can do in America.”

He decided then that the first iteration would be something he could make in his garage using 3-D printing, he said.

“So I’ve been planning that — doing the research to set up a 3-D printer farm to rapidly scale and do grassroots manufacturing. I’ve been running that playbook through my head for about a year before this all happened,” he said. “It put me in a unique situation to have the technical skill and understanding to be able to really execute this.”

When the coronavirus outbreak hit Asian and European countries, people in those countries with 3-D printers helped fulfill the PPE shortage, Olsen said. Using the model he had already been working on, he took that idea and brought it to Birmingham.

“There are a million different designs and a million different iterations of basically this thing, but the face shields specifically are what we can do effectively with 3-D printers,” Olsen said.

He started a GoFundMe on March 22, and it ramped up into a huge community effort, he said.

“My big thing is this: I want people in the community to be engaged,” he said. “Everyone can help, and there’s therapy in that, in not feeling powerless. And when people see kids doing this amazing stuff, I think it’s inspirational.”

Olsen commented on how invested Goyal is in the project, especially since both of her parents use PPE in their jobs.

“Meghan, after she was done with her first batch of 3-D printing, she was like, ‘John, um, I’m going to bring some stuff downtown, but do you think I could give some of these face shields to my dad? He’s in the hospital right now,’” Olsen remembered. “I was like, ‘Of course you can give them to your dad!’

“These are the people who are invested in this thing. Not everyone has a doctor or a nurse or has one as a family member. But the people that do, they’re burning the candle at both ends, and they’re loving it.”

Being able to meet and become friends with people like Goyal has been the most rewarding part of the project, Olsen said.

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