Invention of a Medical Glove Durability Assessment Device

Abstract

Healthcare workers across the globe rely on medical gloves to prevent the transfer of harmful bacteria and viruses between themselves and their patients. Unfortunately, due to the lack of an in-use durability standard for medical gloves by the American Society for Testing and Materials, many of these gloves are of low quality and are easily torn or punctured, exposing wearers and patients to potentially deadly diseases. To solve this problem, a device that automatically detects material failures the size of a pinhole during active testing was invented. The device consists of a prosthetic hand, vacuum pump, mobile textured roller, pressure sensor, and liquid spray system. It works by creating a vacuum inside the glove and repeatedly moving the textured roller into contact with the fingertips, which, on the prosthetic hand, are porous. When a glove perforates, the vacuum is broken, pressure within the hand rapidly increases, and the operator is alerted on a touchscreen that the glove has failed. In addition, the liquid spray system allows the user to test gloves in “real world” conditions, because healthcare workers often come into contact with liquids that may alter glove durability. As a preliminary test of the device’s accuracy, five nitrile and five latex exam gloves were tested using the system’s default settings. Natural latex is known to be the highest performing glove material, so the nitrile gloves were expected to fail more quickly than the latex gloves. The test results concur with this expected order of failure: nitrile first, with an average failure time of 300 s and 42 average number of roller touches, followed by natural latex, with an average failure time of 2206 s and 300 average number of roller touches. These results provide evidence that the device accurately ranks glove durability, and therefore could be used to develop an ASTM durability standard and improve the quality of gloves made from different polymers.