Crisis Innovation

Connie Wang, a senior in the Rhode Island School of Design undergraduate architecture department, worked with a task force that targeted the protective suit’s headgear.

“We basically wanted to increase the comfort levels of the doctor or caretaker and at the same time add a humanizing component,” Wang said. “We took the concept from a beekeeper’s suit, and merged it with an astronaut’s.”

With current protective gear, “a lot of the only contact you have is through your eyes,” said Wang. “We introduced, basically, a headpiece where it is still protective of all of the fluids, but the hood that they put on now is a clear front, so you see the whole face.”

They repurposed it from a protective suit demonstrated by Dr. Noah Rosenberg, an emergency room physician at Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals and member of a hospital Ebola on-call team.

And, Wang’s task force devised a “cooling patch” using refrigerated pouches of locally harvested rice. “You strap [the pouch] onto yourself — the rice absorbs humidity and heat,” she said.

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