Customized Facial Constant Positive Air Pressure (CPAP) Masks
This addresses the issue of air leakage and discomfort for sleep apnea patients due to standard mask incompatibility, representing an incremental improvement in personalized medical device design.
The paper tackles the problem of poorly fitting CPAP masks for sleep apnea patients by proposing a fully automatic approach to design personalized nasal mask interfaces using facial depth scans, resulting in accurately fitting masks that are easy to manufacture with cheap sensors and 3D printing.
Sleep apnea is a syndrome that is characterized by sudden breathing halts while sleeping. One of the common treatments involves wearing a mask that delivers continuous air flow into the nostrils so as to maintain a steady air pressure. These masks are designed for an average facial model and are often difficult to adjust due to poor fit to the actual patient. The incompatibility is characterized by gaps between the mask and the face, which deteriorates the impermeability of the mask and leads to air leakage. We suggest a fully automatic approach for designing a personalized nasal mask interface using a facial depth scan. The interfaces generated by the proposed method accurately fit the geometry of the scanned face, and are easy to manufacture. The proposed method utilizes cheap commodity depth sensors and 3D printing technologies to efficiently design and manufacture customized masks for patients suffering from sleep apnea.