The Air Shield Mini is small and light — just 5 centimeters wide and weighing the same as a AA battery.
Air Shield Mini
The impacts of air pollution are a growing concern for health organizations and climate regulators.
Traditional air purifiers are bulky, high maintenance, and use a lot of power.
Two UK startups are using negative-ion tech to create what they say are portable air purifiers.
This story is part of “How Emerging Tech Is Changing Everything,” a series exploring the transformative impact of tech innovations across industries.
Air pollution is a global problem that has an enormous effect on well-being and longevity. Research from the World Health Organization found that 99% of the global population was breathing air containing high levels of pollutants, with low- and middle-income countries suffering from the highest exposures.
The pandemic prompted some countries to prioritize finding ways to alleviate and prevent air pollution, including encouraging people to wear face masks. The UK government has invested £42 million, or about $51.6 million, to fund research and innovation in this area through 2025.
This increased attention from legislators has emboldened new startups to look at the problem in closer detail. And the technologies they’re developing allow customers to analyze their environments at the molecular level.
Personal air-cleaning devices are taking off
Jay Vitale, the CEO of Air For Life, a company developing filterless, dual-ionization technology, has been focused on fighting air pollution for more than 15 years.
“The general attitude of the public after COVID has made people a lot more health-conscious, including more interest in air purifiers and also the effects of air quality and the impacts on health,” he said.
The company, based in Milton Keynes in the UK, has been developing its tech with a specific focus on helping people relieve symptoms from asthma and allergies, with the goal of reducing people’s use of medication.
The Air For Life technology creates “human-friendly” negative ions — which a study published in 2018 in the National Library of Medicine found eliminated impurities in the air and on surfaces — within an enclosed space. Vitale, a graduate of King’s College London’s medical school, said: “When negative ions collide with any impurities in the air, such as pollutants, bacteria, viruses, and allergens, they attach to the impurity and destroy it or demobilize it at a molecular level, thus purifying the air and the surfaces inside an indoor space.”
This level of air-quality control is gaining popularity as large-scale pollution events such as smog and forest fires affect more people every year.
“The industry is shifting towards smart devices and smart technology, where people want to physically see the performance of a product which they are buying to improve their health with measurable indicators or statistics,” Vitale said.
Inspired by nature
Negative ions can be found in high concentrations in sea air, in mountain air, and near waterfalls, places typically thought to have the cleanest air. Vitale said exposure to negative ions could increase serotonin levels in the brain, which would help alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as improve sleep quality.
Vitale said these ions had also been found to be effective at destroying impurities as small as 0.001 microns, including viruses, and are reported to eliminate bad odors, dust, pet dander, and even mold.
Traditional air purifiers, which use high-efficiency-particulate-absorbing filters or a combination of HEPA filters and ionizing technology, can filter impurities only up to 0.3 microns, so they don’t account for all small bacteria or viruses. Apart from the difference in precision, Vitale said there’s also the cost of replacing traditional filters, which his company’s technology avoids. Instead, he said, his company’s devices contain cartridges equipped with a UV light that can be replaced yearly.
Each device has a built-in fan that draws air into the unit. The company says the technology works by passing air through a UV lamp that destroys contaminants as they pass through. At the same time, the UV light shines on the nanoparticle catalyst, which causes a reaction that releases negative ions.
Clean air in your pocket
Another new arrival in the air-purification market is a wearable air purifier called the Air Shield Mini. Launched in October and available to order now, the device is the brainchild of Christiaan Trahms, a 34-year-old tech entrepreneur.
The product’s 10-year development process was deeply personal for Trahms, who was born in South Africa and moved to London in 2008. He was horrified by the effect the city’s air had on his health, he told Insider.
“I first noticed the taste of the air in the back of my throat and lungs and the impact it had on my breathing,” Trahms said. “But whenever I left and returned to London, I became aware of other effects — London’s air was making me more irritable and more tired.”
Back then, the only machines capable of cleaning air effectively were immovable, industrial units. So Trahms wondered, “What if you could take the ability to breathe clean air with you?” He started to develop a portable purifier, and he recognized its market potential after the pandemic hit.
The Air Shield Mini is small and light — just 5 centimeters wide and weighing the same as a AA battery. Trahms said the device emitted a constant stream of millions of negative ions, which bind to pollutants — or agglomerate — rather than destroy them. As a result of the process, you get larger clusters of particles that are now too heavy to remain airborne. They then fall to the ground or onto nearby surfaces, keeping them well away from the user.
Trahms said the Air Shield Mini was powerful enough to generate a 3-foot-wide bubble of purified air around the wearer. The purifier is also silent, and its battery lasts 12 hours on a single charge, he said.
The path forward
There are still some regulatory issues around clean-air tech. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration began regulating air purifiers after the COVID-19 pandemic hit; its guidance on those devices is in flux. They remain unregulated in the UK, according to Nicola Carslaw, a professor of indoor-air chemistry at the University of York.
“Anyone buying such a device has to rely on information provided by the manufacturer to determine how efficiently it removes pollutants,” she said. “The devices tend to be tested under carefully controlled laboratory conditions rather than in a typical, occupied building. The issue of secondary pollutant formation is often not addressed, and advice on where an air-cleaning device should be placed for best results is often absent.”
Still, Trahms is optimistic. He said this sort of technology looked set to take off in a big way: “Many people have become accustomed to it in the workplace and at home, and I think the time is right to give them the power to breathe better-quality air wherever they go.”