“Over five million Americans are required to wear respirators in their workplace,” says Dr. Maryann D’Alessandro, Director of NPPTL. “The talking head is an innovative scientific advance that offers transformational promise to better understanding respiratory protection and respirator fit for an increasingly diverse workforce.”
Using the measurements of nearly 4,0000 individuals, NIOSH created five digital headform sizes. From there, the talking head was built by Hanson Robotics Inc. to mimic a real human head with a silicone elastomer artificial skin and functional lip and jaw movements. Furthermore, researchers engineered a way for them to simulate all possible movements of speech and imitate the exercises a worker performs during a respirator fit test.
According to Ziqing Zhuang, Ph.D., a research team leader at NIOSH, the robotic talking head will expand the opportunities for research into potential respirator leakage and can be beneficial for respirator fit evaluation research because, unlike human subjects, it does not require human subject review board clearance or experience weight changes or fatigue.
NIOSH will focus on using the talking head with certified N95 filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs),
commonly used in the healthcare industry to reduce exposure to respiratory pathogens like influenza for the initial fit evaluation research.
More information can be found at www.cdc.gov/niosh, or click here to watch a video of the “talking head.”