Citation: Venturini, A.; Pancake, M.; VanCleave, W.; Wan, Y.; Cornish, K. Invention of a Medical Glove Durability Assessment Device. Inventions 2022, 7, 62. https:// doi.org/10.3390/inventions7030062 Academic Editors: Shoou-Jinn Chang and Seung Hwan Ko Received: 7 June 2022 Accepted: 18 July 2022 Published: 22 July 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). inventions Article Invention of a Medical Glove Durability Assessment Device Ashley Venturini 1 , Mary Pancake 2 , Walt VanCleave 2 , Yongbo Wan 2 and Katrina Cornish 1,3,4, * 1 Department of Food, Agricultural, and Biological Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA; venturini.3@osu.edu 2 Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA; pancake.6@osu.edu (M.P.); vancleave.3@osu.edu (W.V.); wan.239@osu.edu (Y.W.) 3 Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA 4 EnergyEne Inc., Wooster, OH 44691, USA * Correspondence: cornish.19@osu.edu 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. Keywords: glove durability; medical examination gloves; durability standard 1. Introduction Medical gloves are an essential piece of personal protective equipment (PPE) because they act as a protective barrier, preventing the transfer of bacteria, viruses, and toxins from healthcare worker to patient and vice versa. With the emergence and spread of COVID-19 in early 2020, the demand for medical gloves doubled, resulting in many healthcare facilities facing a shortage of these necessary supplies [1,2]. Despite the important role of gloves in disease prevention, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards for rubber surgical gloves (D3577-19) and rubber examination gloves (D3578-19) lack a specification for in-use glove durability once the gloves are removed from their packaging by the consumer [3,4]. Manufacturing and polymer differences mean that some types of gloves are more prone to breakage under stress than others. Unfortunately, the current ASTM standard for the detection of holes in medical gloves only measures the incidence of gloves with holes before their actual use, and this protocol entails merely filling a glove with tap water and observing it for leaks [5]. Inventions 2022, 7, 62. https://doi.org/10.3390/inventions7030062 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/inventions