Title: Respirators in the Emergency Department: Communication Solutions to Counter Voice Attenuation while wearing PPEs

Team: Anubhav Shankar, Mitchell Wong, Chichi Chang

Client: Emergency Medicine – Neil Ray, MD & Dheeraj Duggineni, MD (U. Penn)

Every cardiopulmonary resuscitation involves a team of about seven staff frantically performing CPR, evaluating vitals, and calling for medications. Emergency department nurses and physicians have to overcome many hurdles to communicate. With the onset of the pandemic, team members must wear N95 masks and respirators to protect the wearer from aerosolized transmission. However, in the fast-paced emergency medicine department, respirators are resisting regular communication by muffling their voices. Additionally, staff must holler over the emergency department’s chaos or use makeshift solutions such as walkie talkies with inconvenient press-to-talk. These temporary fixes are time-consuming, ineffective, and cause fatigue.

Our unmet need centers on devising a method to counter the voice attenuation in respirators for emergency department resuscitation teams to improve intra-team verbal communication.