LONDON, United Kingdom (Reuters) — For parents raising children in urban environments, the quality of air their little ones breathe can be a big concern.
Recent studies have linked infants exposed to higher levels of vehicular air pollution with lung problems later on in life.
It was this concern for his own daughter that prompted Yosi Romano to invent Brizi Baby, a cushioned headrest for a baby’s pushchair with in-built sensors and a fan filter system that cuts the amount of pollution around the child’s head.
Romano realized that the heaviest concentrations of vehicle exhausts are at around 2 feet (61 cm) off the ground – the same level as babies in their pushchairs.
“When Alma my daughter was born I took her in her pram on Finchley Road, one of the most polluted streets in London. And I realized that her pram puts her at the same height of the tail-pipe of the buses,” he told Reuters.
“When an adult stands next to a pram and pushes the pram he breathes better air than what the baby is breathing because the heavy particles of pollution are laying down low.”
When Brizi’s sensors detect gases or particulate matter it triggers a duel-fan unit to filter out pollution and create a clean air barrier by delivering 1.5 liters of clean, filtered air to the child’s breathing area every ten seconds.
“We made Brizi autonomous; when the sensor detects pollution it triggers the fan in Brizi and it filters the air in the baby breathing area,” added Romano.
Brizi’s patented multi-layered filter system is embedded in a comfortable and bendable cushion.
One side of the filter has a medical-grade woven fabric layer to remove fine particles in the air from industrial pollution and traffic.
The other layer is carbon to filter out harmful gases, like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide.
Romano and his team have built a working prototype of the Brizi Baby which was used by Professor Prashant Kumar, the Chair in Air Quality & Health at the University of Surrey, to test how effective it was under real-world conditions.
The results showed Brizi can reduce normal ambient air pollution in the breathing area of the child by 49 percent; though this rises in areas where pollution is particularly high, such as near an idling vehicle.
“We managed to design a product that reduced the pollution by 80 percent when the air is really polluted,” said Romono.
As well as Brizi Baby, Romano has also developed a digital app and a portable Brizi Sensor. The sensor continuously collects pollution data as a person carries it around, with the app creating a heat-map showing which walking routes are more polluted than others.
Brizi recently launched a crowd-funding campaign to help turn their prototype into a consumer model. If successful, they hope to start shipping Brizi in August 2018; helping babies, as well as their parents, breathe a little easier.