Children as superheroes: designing playful 3D-printed facemasks for maxillofacial disorders

The paper describes a Human-Centred Design approach to developing customised facemasks for the orthopaedic correction of Class III malocclusions in children. The effectiveness of facemask therapy critically depends on patient’s compliance with the recommended wear time, possibly ranging between 14- 24 hours a day, over a time span of at least 9 months. Commercial facemasks are unaesthetic, uncomfortable and cause irritations due to the direct contact of plastic on the skin (Stocker et al., 2016). The research project SuperPowerMe develops a custom-made facemask to make the impact of the therapeutic intervention more sustainable in a critical stage of the physical and psychological child development. Differently from commercial facemasks, SuperPowerMe is composed of 3D-printable biocompatible materials which make the device comfortable and customisable. SuperPowerMe adopts a gamification approach (Birk et al.,2016): a smartphone application provides games of increasing challenge where a superhero avatar wearing a facemask akin to the one worn by the child gains power fighting against monsters and other characters. An ergonomic customised prototype facemask has been developed and will be soon tested at the Careggi Hospital in Florence, Italy.