Reuse of medical face masks in domestic and community settings without sacrificing safety: Ecological and economical lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic

The need for personal protective equipment increased exponentially in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. To cope with the mask shortage during springtime 2020, a French consortium was created to find ways to reuse medical and respiratory masks in healthcare departments. The consortium addressed the complex context of the balance between cleaning medical masks in a way that maintains their safety and functionality for reuse, with the environmental advantage to manage medical disposable waste despite the current mask designation as single-use by the regulatory frameworks. We report a Workflow that provides a quantitative basis to determine the safety and efficacy of a medical mask that is decontaminated for reuse. The type IIR polypropylene medical masks can be washed up to 10 times, washed 5 times and autoclaved 5 times, or washed then sterilized with radiations or ethylene oxide, without any degradation of their filtration or breathability properties. There is loss of the antiprojection properties. The Workflow rendered the medical masks to comply to the AFNOR S76-001 standard as “type 1 non-sanitory usage masks”. This qualification gives a legal status to the Workflow-treated masks and allows recommendation for the reuse of washed medical masks by the general population, with the significant public health advantage of providing better protection than cloth-tissue masks. Additionally, such a legal status provides a basis to perform a clinical trial to test the masks in real conditions, with full compliance with EN 14683 norm, for collective reuse. The rational reuse of medical mask and their end-of-life management is critical, particularly in pandemic periods when decisive turns can be taken. The reuse of masks in the general population, in industries, or in hospitals (but not for surgery) has significant advantages for the management of waste without degrading the safety of individuals wearing reused masks

Troubles de la repolarisation immédiats post cardioversion de fibrillation atriale par choc électrique externe (incidence, caractéristiques et facteurs prédictifs)

Les troubles de la repolarisation secondaires à la cardioversion par choc électrique externe de la fibrillation atriale sont fréquents mais souvent méconnus en raison de leur caractère transitoire. Nous avons étudié ces phénomènes lors d'une étude prospective observationnelle ayant inclus cents patients sur une durée de neuf mois. L'analyse des données cliniques, électrocardiographiques, biologiques et échographiques nous a permis de confirmer l'absence de lésion myocardique significative et de retentissement pronostic. Nous avons retrouvé comme facteurs prédictifs : le caractère monophasique des chocs, l'impédance thoracique peu élevée, la dysfonction ventriculaire gauche, la calcémie basse, l'élévation de la protéine réactive C et l'utilisation du propofol. Les sus décalages du segment ST étant liés au choc monophasique, à l'impédance peu élevée, à la calcémie basse, à l'élévation de la CRP et à l'utilisation du propofol ; les sous décalages au choc biphasique, à la dysfonction VG et à l'élévation de la CRP. Le mécanisme physiopathologique sous tendant ces manifestations semble être, après revue de la littérature, l'électroporation (formation de microfractures de la membrane cellulaire par le courant électrique).TOULOUSE3-BU Santé-Centrale (315552105) / SudocPARIS-BIUM (751062103) / SudocSudocFranceF

Capteur micro-onde de radiation nucléaire passif sans fil optimisé

National audienceUn capteur de radiation nucléaire sans fil et sans batterie est présenté. Celui-ci est basé sur la modification de la fréquence de résonance d'un résonateur micro-onde planaire par le déplacement d'une micro-membrane de silicium soumise à une surpression. Celle-ci est générée lors de l'irradiation par le dégazage d'un film de polyéthylène. Les différentes causes de non reproductibilité de la sensibilité aux radiations nucléaires sont analysées. Une nouvelle solution technologique est proposée pour simplifier la fabrication grâce à une interconnexion par iris de couplage

Benchmarking the Dependability of Windows and Linux using PostMark ™ Workloads *

International audienceThis paper presents a dependability benchmark for general-purpose operating systems and its application to six versions of Windows operating system and four versions of Linux operating system. The benchmark measures are: operating system robustness (as regards possible erroneous inputs provided by the application software to the operating system via the application programming interface), reaction and restart times in the presence of faults. The workload is PostMark, a file system performance benchmark for operating systems

Wireless and Passive Nuclear Radiation Sensors

International audienceThis communication reports the first experimental results obtained from new type of passive Hydrogen-Pressure Dosimeters for the remote measurement of nuclear radiation. Technological and experimental analyses are performed here to demonstrate the proof-of-concept. Radar measurements of irradiated and non-irradiated passive dosimeters are also reported and confirm the feasibility of the remote reading of such passive sensors. A new design is proposed for minimizing the impact of technological inaccuracies on sensors performances and for facilitating the packaging

Schütz-Jahrbuch

A new millimetre-wave passive and chipless packaged sensor for wireless pressure monitoring in harsh environment is proposed. This sensor uses a planar microstrip resonator coupled with a high resistivity silicon membrane. The remote interrogation of this sensor is performed from a Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radar. Prototypes have been designed and fabricated using photoresist intermediate layer for the silicon membrane bonding. Pressure characterization of packaged sensor validate the transducer and packaging hermeticity. The sensor sensitivity is close to 2% per bar for the resonant frequency and the radar response is evaluated at 2 dB per bar

An optimized design for an intelligent walking-aid

International audienc

Aperture-coupled microstrip resonator for Millimeter-wave passive pressure sensors

International audienceIn this paper, a millimeter-wave passive pressure sensor based on an aperture-coupled microstrip resonator is proposed. The aperture-coupling technique is applied here for improving the airtightness of pressure sensors and for avoiding unwanted electromagnetic radiation occurring when using the widely used probe-fed technique. The measured additional insertion loss due to the aperture-coupling is found to be of 1.4dB only. Both 3D full-wave electromagnetic simulation results and experimental data are reported for the validation of the novel millimeter-wave sensor design

Capteur de pression passif à résonateur micro-ruban excité par iris de couplage

National audienc

Impact of anodic bonding on transmission loss in 23GHz pressure transducers

International audienceThis paper analyses the impact of anodic bonding technique on the transmission loss in 23GHz pressure transducers. The transducers consist of a thin high resistivity silicon membrane and a 23GHz planar resonator placed inside a cavity. Two types of transmission line are used here for designing the resonators: probe-fed coplanar lines and aperture-coupled microstrip ones. Transducers based on aperture-coupled microstrip resonators and manufactured from the anodic bonding process for assembling the silicon membrane to the glass substrate are the most promising low-loss solution. It is actually shown that, at the resonant frequency of the planar resonator, the measured transmission loss in a probe-fed coplanar transducer is about 4dB when using bonding with the photoresist as an intermediate layer, while it is only of 2.55dB when applying the anodic bonding assembling process. However, we report for the first time that very high and unexpected transmission loss (>30dB) occurs when using anodic bonding technique to manufacture the 23GHz aperture-coupled microstrip transducers