Fear of the Ebola virus has subsided stateside, but the epidemic persists in West Africa. The disease claimed some 8,000 lives last year, including 360 healthcare workers. The culprit, more often than not, was faulty protective gear or accidental exposure to the virus while removing the many layers of protection they must wear.

A skunkworks team at Johns Hopkins University has developed a prototype protective suit to better shield healthcare workers on the front line of the epidemic. The suit—which uses several zippers and fasteners to fall off and peel outward, away from the wearer so they need not touch the outer surfaces—evolved through a design challenge USAID launched last fall. The Johns Hopkins’ team—which includes Jhpiego and Clinvue innovation consulting—is among five competition winners.

To design a better suit, the 70 participants in the hackathon-like event at Johns Hopkins had to first single out weak points in current designs. In its current form, doffing the many layers of gear takes about 20 minutes, a partner, and several steps that make for less than a seamless process. And even when worn correctly, the head gear doesn’t attach to the body suit, creating an easy opportunity for the virus to sneak in. “You’re talking about a literal S-H-I-T storm of bodily fluids,” says Youseph Yazdi, who runs the Center for Bioengineering and Design at Johns Hopkins. “People are sick and vomiting, a nurse will bend over to pick up something on the floor, get vomit on the back of their neck, it’s coming from all directions.”

What healthcare workers need is gear that requires far fewer interaction points, because every time a nurse comes into contact with the outside of her suit, he or she could be brushing up against the virus. The designers, engineers, and medical students at the hackathon had to stick with the Tyvek or Tychem material currently used to make the suits—changing the manufacturing process too much would make it hard to ship new gear in a timely manner—so they looked to the zippers and fasteners instead.

Easy to Take Off, and More Comfortable to Wear

At the nape of the wearer’s neck, there are two tabs that attach to a breakaway zipper. Tug them, and the entire back of the suit falls open. The key is the zipper: instead of standard zips that attach at the teeth, the team used a high performance one that breaks open like a Ziploc baggie. (Firemen and emergency workers use them on their gear.) Pull straps at each shoulder have a little extra slack, so the wearer bends over, steps on each strap, stands up, and slithers easily out of the crumpled hazmat suit. The suit turns inside out as it is removed, reducing the risk of accidental contamination while disposing of it, and is color-coded to indicate those areas that are safe to touch with gloved hands.

Another way to keep workers from touching the outside of their (probably contaminated) protective gear is simply by keeping them inside it longer. That’s been an issue in West African clinics, where hot climates mean workers can’t stand to don the gear for longer than about an hour at a time. “What if you can extend that to two hours?” Yazdi says. “That would put off taking them off, and cut down on contamination.”

The prototype suit features a cooling system adopted from technology used by cardiologists attending to stroke patients. The premise there that if you cool down the brain in a person who’s suffered a stroke, you have more time to treat them. This is accomplished by simply supplying drier air to the patient. For the suit, it happens through an air chamber that funnels oxygen into the mask, at the top of the wearer’s head.

One last perk to the new suit? It’s less frightening for patients. By positioning the oxygen supply on top of the skull, the Johns Hopkins team created more transparency around the face. “People are afraid of Ebola workers,” Yazdi says. “They look like space men, and their mouths are covered up. They’re wearing white, which is scary in that culture—they’re all undertakers. So we tried to make the face very visible. For people who can’t hear, they can at least see the person talking and smiling. Those are really important for someone on their deathbed.”