Nordic-powered air purifying respirator provides worker fall and fatigue alerts

In conjunction with French technology provider SMARTALY, Netherlands-based, high-tech personal protective equipment (PPE) company, AirBliss+, has released a Beta version of its new half-mask, powered air purifying respirator (PAPR). The product reduces the risk of fatigue-related accidents in the mining and process industry where people often work in harsh environments. 

The ‘Maasc’ is a compact, lightweight (200 g), powered filtering device complying with the EN 12942 standard, delivering the highest level of protection (NPF 2000) with a total inward leakage of less than 0.05 percent. The TM3 filtering class stops most pollutants including smoke, aerosols, dust, and viruses with 99.95 percent efficiency.  

The device integrates a range of sensors—including temperature, humidity, pressure, and particulate matter sensors, plus a gyroscope to monitor head movements—enabling the measurement of user habits to anticipate their level of fatigue and alert the worker and/or the remote supervising team when action needs to be taken. 

“Maasc offers a unique combination of high-performance air filtration and technology to detect fall and fatigue symptoms and send alerts, enhanced with a ‘neural network engine’ with Machine Learning [ML] capabilities,” explains José Tavares, CTO of AirBliss+, the company responsible for designing the product’s mechanical and respiratory features. 

nRF5340 supervises sensors and enables alerts 

Maasc integrates Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF5340 Bluetooth® 5.4 SoC to act as the master controller for the product. The SoC features dual Arm® Cortex®-M33 processors; a high-performance application processor capable of DSP and Floating Point (FP) for supervising the device’s integrated sensors, as well as a fully programmable, ultra-low power network processor. The network processor provides Bluetooth LE connectivity for local data acquisition and to send the alerts to a gateway device, or alternatively to other Maasc devices in a Bluetooth mesh network. Any node of this mesh network can then connect to a gateway to transfer the data/alerts of all units. In addition, Maasc integrates the Nordic nRF52810 SoC to enhance the sensor filtering and add some sensor pre-processing to improve the signals.