AirShield: Virtual 'Air Curtain' to protect against COVID-19 transmission from patients to healthworkers in hospital ICUs

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The current coronavirus pandemic has highlighted how hospital in-patients with respiratory infections can spread disease to staff and other patients. Medical staff comprise 10% of coronavirus cases in Italy and early signs indicate that UK medical staff will also be disproportionately affected. Patients with contagious infections (e.g. Measles, SARS, TB) are normally isolated in negative pressure rooms, but in epidemic and low resource settings, this is impossible. Learning from the SARS epidemic of 2003, some countries have put all intensive care beds in negative pressure rooms, but in the UK almost all of these beds are still on open wards.AirShield solves this problem, allowing virtual isolation of the patient in intensive care (or hospital ward), whilst maintaining easy access to the patient from all sides of the bed. This is managed by adapting laminar airflow technology widely used in laboratories to maintain sterile work areas to the clinical environment and retrofitting to hospital beds. The air will be filtered of any exhaled droplets/aerosols so a wall of clean air surrounds the patient. Risks of infection spread to staff and other patients (and subsequent sickness and potential deaths), are significantly reduced. The system is simple to implement, cost-effective and easily scaled, enabling expansion of isolation beds as existing hospital facilities are overwhelmed, and has wider application for other infectious diseases globally, especially in low resource environments.ADDITIONAL EXTENSION FOR IMPACT INFORMATIONThe scope will be widened to explore market diversification of the AirShield offering beyond immediate COVID-19 ICU-related infectious disease transmission to shielding from infectious particulates in wider post-pandemic settings to ensure a viable long-term business model. Adaptation and miniaturisation of the system design will allow use in wider clinical settings e.g. near-patient use during outpatient consultations and further expansion to low-resource settings in the developing world.