The following is a summary of “Aerosol containment device design considerations and performance evaluation metrics,” published in the February 2023 issue of Emergency Medicine by Jones, et al.

Aerosol containment devices (ACDs) were created in response to the 2019 Coronavirus infectious disease pandemic to stop the spread of contagious respiratory aerosols produced by patients. Prior analyses suggested that these devices had little proof of their efficacy, but they did not address how ACDs were to be assessed, how effectively they ought to function or have well-defined performance requirements. Two queries were asked in order to build design requirements for ACDs: What factors influenced the development of ACDs? What evaluation criteria were used for these traits?

According to PRISMA recommendations, a scoping review was completed. Information on the overall research, the device’s intended purpose, its design features, and an appraisal of the gadget were all collected from the data.

There were 54 articles in total. The most often evaluated aspect of a device was its ability to control aerosols (n = 31, 61%); provider experience, patient experience, and procedure effect were all explicitly assessed in 5 (9%), 3 (6%) and 8 (15%) cases, respectively. Intubation was examined in almost all of the research that looked at provider experience and procedure effect. Few research referenced any external benchmarking standards or offered a priori performance criteria for any assessment parameter.

If the aim is to lessen reliance on personal protective equipment, ACDs should minimize exposure among HCP with the device relative to exposure without the device and deliver ≥90% reduction in respirable aerosols, equal in performance to N95 filtering facepiece respirators. The ACD shouldn’t encourage unnatural or unpleasant postures or negatively affect the process’s biomechanics since this might affect how the procedure turns out. There were several standardized tools available to evaluate patient and healthcare professional experiences. Thorough research on aerosol containment and the user experience was required before integrating ACDs into ordinary clinical practice.

Reference: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675722007008