Students' Unique Platform for Face-Shield Production Hits Close to Home
For the students behind The CommonHealth Project — a collaborative, community-based initiative aimed at rallying volunteers for production and distribution of urgently needed personal protective equipment (PPE) — the pandemic is deeply personal. Mark Pothen ’22, a mechanical engineering major at NJIT, for example, hears stories from his mother, a physician working on the front line at Mountainside Hospital. Adé Kolade ’23, an Honors scholar who is studying electrical engineering, is the son of a doctor and a public health nurse-turned nursing professor. And Ruth Fiore ’21, a biomedical engineering student, is living with two of her sisters, who both work full time at a grocery store and have been wearing the same KN95 masks every day for more than a month.
Other team members — Owais Aftab ’20, Parth Agrawal ’21 and Juliana Yang ’21, all biomedical engineering students (Aftab and Agrawal are also accelerated pre-health) — either know emergency medical technicians or are planning careers in health care. A seventh student, Daniel Lee, is a friend of Agrawal’s and is in the nursing program at Case Western Reserve University.
The group describes The CommonHealth Project as people-powered, with individuals volunteering their time to either construct face shields in their homes from preassembled kits, or deliver the kits to volunteers and then collect the end products and drive them to hospitals in Bergen and Morris counties. The crowdsourced model follows a strict no-contact policy, so kits are placed just outside builders’ houses for drop-offs and pickups. Builders and drivers must also adhere to specific instructions laid out by the project to further ensure safety.
“We’ve had an overwhelming response to our call for volunteers and we’re very thankful for that,” said Agrawal, CommonHealth’s project coordinator (pictured above), citing over 100 signups through the project's website form. “We want to make sure that everybody gets shields, but it is based on how many materials we can purchase.”
CommonHealth’s face-shield design takes less than five minutes to construct, at a cost of $1.31 per shield. The kits include clear polyethylene terephthalate sheets, elastic bands, foam rectangles and staples for 10 shields. Funding for the project is 100% donation-driven through the Givebutter platform.
Hope for the Project – “Given that our scaling model has shown significant promise, I hope that we could expand and place distribution centers in Essex and other counties that are being hard hit. Eventually, I hope that we are able to continue scaling until we can cover the state and supply PPE to many more of our front-line workers.” – Mark Pothen
Hope for the Project: “I hope we can continue producing face shields for the duration of the pandemic. It excites me that we are potentially capable of helping even more of the people putting their lives on the line at health care centers and the people with which they come in contact.” – Adé Kolade
Getting on Board for the Cause
So how did this particular group of students come together to form CommonHealth? The origin lies with a PPE design-and-production competition sponsored by NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College (ADHC) this past March. The students submitted one of nine designs received by ADHC, and although they did not win the challenge, realized they had hit upon something and were motivated to take their idea further.
“One problem that a lot of volunteer constructors are running into is the fact that it’s very difficult to mass produce these shields … in quarantine right now if you don’t have industrial-level equipment or industrial-level capacity,” noted Agrawal, who recalled how the team then thought, “What if we can take the materials and enable people at home to pitch in? We all jumped on that.”
Toward this end, the team created The CommonHealth Project and members settled swiftly into their respective roles. As supply chain manager, Pothen works with Agrawal in securing materials to maintain production; he also packages materials and serves as distribution manager for Bergen County. Fiore is logistics manager, assigning constructors and drivers, coordinating routes for drop-offs, pickups and deliveries, and ensuring the system runs smoothly overall.
Both Kolade and Yang are involved in face-shield design. Kolade, who initiated the response to the ADHC challenge, is the point person for design development, innovation and tinkering. Yang designed the shield’s first prototype — greatly inspired by University of Wisconsin’s open-source shield design — and, as design and outreach manager, continues to help refine that prototype based on feedback from both the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management and medical professionals at local health care centers; she maintains communication with area hospitals and conducts outreach to build the volunteer network as well.
And while as finance manager/treasurer, Aftab tracks the project’s finances and explores fundraising channels, Lee is responsible for social media and outreach as promotion manager.
NJIT and ADHC alumnus Vatsal Shah ’08, ’09, ’14, a civil engineer with Mott MacDonald, has been instrumental in helping the team launch the project, with both a monetary gift and ongoing mentoring. “It didn’t just end with the financial booster shot,” Agrawal said. “Vatsal has been sitting with us for hours every week, giving the team guidance on the project, giving the team guidance on life.”
Hope for the Project: “I hope to expand our distribution network to more counties and that we can continue to produce face shields and donate them to health care workers in neglected facilities and other essential workers, including police, firefighters and first-aid squads.” – Juliana Yang
Hope for the Project: “I am hopeful that we can continue to make a positive impact in our community by significantly alleviating any and all face-shield shortages across hospitals, first-aid squads, nursing homes and our community at large.” – Owais Aftab
Progress to Date and Looking Ahead
The CommonHealth Project has quickly become a well-oiled machine. With some 140 volunteers in Bergen and Morris counties, the initiative will have delivered 4,000 face shields by next week to hospitals that include Morristown and Holy Name Medical Centers and Valley Hospital. As long as the project has funding and PPE is needed, the plan is to continue with kit drop-off to constructors on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and pickup and transport of completed shields on Mondays.
“I hope we can scale up to over 1,000 masks being produced every week,” Fiore said.
What makes CommonHealth’s construction and distribution platform unique is the potential for it to be scaled up for other mass production in the future. “If we get this model right, one of the exciting ideas that we’ve been kicking around is repurposing that distribution network. Maybe there’s another design that’s better than ours, maybe something else needs to be done to mass produce something on a volunteer level by [another] community,” explained Agrawal.
“This is a community crisis. We want to foster a spirit of collaboration at every step,” he added. “We’re all fighting the same fight. The demand is so large, the word ‘competition’ doesn’t even make sense.”