Design and in-vitro testing of a portable patient isolation chamber for bedside aerosol containment and filtration

The emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has imposed a multitude of complications on healthcare facilities. Healthcare professionals had to develop creative solutions to deal with resource shortages and isolation spaces when caring for COVID positive patients. Among many other solutions, facilities have utilized engineering strategies to mitigate the spread of viral contamination within the hospital environment. One of the standard solutions has been the use of whole room negative pressurization (WRNP) to turn a general patient room into an infection isolation space. However, this has not always been easy due to many limitations, such as direct access to the outdoors and the availability of WRNP units. In operating rooms where a patient is likely to go through aerosol-generating procedures, other solutions must be considered because most operating rooms use positive pressure ventilation to maintain sterility. The research team has designed, built, and tested a Covering for Operations during Viral Emergency Response (COVER), a low-cost, portable isolation chamber that fits over a patient's torso on a hospital bed to contain and remove the pathogenic agents at the source (i.e., patient's mouth and nose). This study tests the performance of the COVER system under various design and performance scenarios using particle tracing techniques and compares its efficiency with WRNP units. The results show that COVER can dramatically reduce the concentration of particles within the room, while WRNP is only effective in preventing the room-induced particles from migrating to adjacent spaces.