Today, the air we breathe ensures more polluting entrants than the oxygen. Polluted air contains many harmful particles and gases including smoke, mold, pollen, methane and carbon dioxide. A typical adult takes around 20,000 breaths per day through which around 600 mg of particulate matter gets deposited in our lungs. Air pollution is a disguised problem that acts as a trigger to instigate many health problems. The air quality index shows hazardous statistics of severe health issues and even deaths among the citizens. In this condition healthy people are developing diseases like asthma and emphysema due to unavailability of clean air to breathe. This air is acting like a poison to the patients suffering from various lung diseases.
How it works:
It is essential to develop a system that would solve the problem by ensuring oxygen-rich and clean air to breathe. The people suffering from respiratory and airborne diseases find it difficult to breathe in the air contaminated with harmful gases and microparticles. The presented solution is an automated system for dispensing medicines to the patients in the form of vapours and protect them from inhaling contaminated air. The system is a combination of a device that consists of a 6M filter used for filtering harmful air and a wearable to determine the condition of the air circulated around.
The mask consists of air filters and a medicine dispenser through which patients or sports person can get automatic or user initiated delivery of medicines without being exposed to injections and pills. The air in the mask is passed through a radial cooling fan which eases the breathing. The medicine dispenser works on the principle of vibration in which particles are moving at a certain frequency. The vibration causes the molecules of liquid medicine to be turned into vapour form. These vapours float in the air inside the mask and is inhaled by the patient. A chamber is incorporated with the design which collects and stores any liquid preferably thin in nature. The medicines with high viscosity is filtered by the filtering chamber of the medicine dispenser.
The wearable watch consists of a system to calculate the particulate matter 2.5 to determine and analyse the environmental air condition of the user and a pulse sensor to determine the condition of the patient in real-time. It is designed to notify the user about the measure of pm2.5 in real-time through emoji generating mechanism such as in case of normal pm level, it would display a smiley face and if pm is recorded to be hazardous in an environment, it would generate a sad face. In every case, the data is orchestrated sent to the cloud and analysed. When a sad emoji and abnormal heart rate is received, the user will get a notification of wearing the mask indicating the environment is not good for his health.
What makes it innovative:
The system is a portable design that can be carried anywhere without requiring any additional hardware for medicine intake. It is a full fledged solution that filters the contaminated particles and reduces the chances of airborne diseases. It acts as medicine delivery device that works on turning liquid medicines in the form of bubbles to be easily supplied to the patient. The device is built for features such as air filtering and medicine dispenser integrated as a unit. It is built in a way that would not restrict the patient to carry any bulky product. The existing aerosol or filtering masks does not dispense medicines from them and requires an additional nebulizer or inhaler to store the medicine connected to mask through a pipe. The device has the built-in chambers for storing the liquid medicines for delivery so does not involve any connecting medium and thus reducing the rate of wastage.
How it would be produced:
In the future stage the prototyped design will be converted into a product form to increase the quality of the device. The 3-D printed mask can be developed from injection moulding and self designed Printed circuit Board will be integrated inside the wearable watch. The sensors used will be replaced by industry based sensors to record more accurate data and thus improving the decision specific analysis. The enhanced quality device consisting of a mask and watch would cost around $35 in the future for market sale.
Potential impact around the globe:
The device is developed to provide medicines in a vapour form to the patients suffering from lung diseases reducing the difficulty in medicine intake through injections and pills. It is a solution that can be utilized by the majority of people who are exposed to harmful particles circulated in air since it also filters the contaminated gases and particles from getting inhaled. Apart from these medicines, sports person can store vitamin and liquified energy supplements in it to inhale them through vaping. It solves the problem of inhaling adulterated air therefore can be used by healthy people to save themselves from acquiring any disease.
