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

Maasc, developed by AirBliss+ and SMARTALY, integrates Nordic nRF5340 SoC to supervise sensors, enable machine learning, and send alerts via Bluetooth LE connectivity

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.

We chose the nRF5340 due to its perfect match of processing power, large memory, and extremely low power consumption to run the embedded AI engine

Arnaud Duclap, CEO of SMARTALY

“The Nordic nRF5340 SoC is at the heart of the Maasc system and manages all the sensor drivers and the middleware layer,” says Arnaud Duclap, CEO of SMARTALY, the company responsible for designing the full electronic component including the embedded software.

The PAPR solution can be easily combined with other PPE such as goggles and hard hats. It also features GPS functionality enabling workers to be located quickly for fast peer rescue in the case of emergencies.

“Maasc is an ergonomic solution that provides a comfortable breathing experience as it does not have a breathing pipe or secondary blowing unit,” adds Tavares. “It is ideal for working in confined spaces or driving vehicles, while enabling full head-and-body mobility.”

Nordic SoC provides low power consumption

“We chose the nRF5340 due to its perfect match of processing power, large memory, and extremely low power consumption to run the embedded AI engine [neural network engine], as well as its capability to run Bluetooth software stack in parallel,” continues SMARTALY’s Duclap.

This low power consumption was crucial, as Maasc employs two rechargeable Li-ion batteries to provide at least four hours of working time of the complete device to meet industry regulations.

“The quality of the Nordic code, tools, and open-source community working on the chips also helped a lot in our decision-making process,” concludes Duclap.