Reports say that pollution causes some common health issues. Everything, including dust, gases, pollen, and noise contribute to it. In your home, you are safe as it’s a protected space. You clean it well to keep the air clean.
How safe are you outside your home?
Dyson is taking a new step toward solving this issue. It has announced the first wearable product that builds the firm’s air purification expertise into a set of Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones aimed at city dwellers wanting to avoid polluted air. This product is sure to make a few heads turn. Unlike any of their usual products, this is a set of large, plush headphones with a plastic mask-type contraption that connects from ear to ear across the wearer’s mouth and looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. There is also a magnetic face visor that keeps it all together and somehow, bizarrely, it fits right into Dyson’s design language. This is both the “strangest and the most ambitious product” Dyson has ever made.
Information on the weight and battery life of the air purifying headset is still not revealed. Dyson products are not known for their battery life, but since these are headphones that essentially need to work longer than a round of cleaning or hair drying, Dyson probably has something figured out.
The visor has four air purification modes – low, medium, high and auto – and uses the same air compression technology found in Dyson’s home air purifiers. A compressor in each earcup of the headphone sucks in fresh air by spinning. The air then passes through double-layered filters made with a potassium-enriched carbon layer, which traps gas pollutants. Clean air exits through the other side of the mesh filter and is projected in a stream along the inner sides of the visor down to the wearer’s mouth and nose, creating what Dyson calls a “bubble” of clean air from which to breathe. Engineers tested the product using a mannequin fitted with mechanical lungs and sensing equipment, which replicated human breathing patterns to “inhale” pollution.
The Dyson Zone air-purifying headphones will be available globally from Autumn 2022. There are three different noise cancellation modes on the Zone – Isolation mode has active ANC when the face visor is raised. Lowering the visor automatically shifts into conversation mode, which disables ANC so you can hear the person you’re talking to. There’s also a transparency mode, which filters out important sounds like car horns and sirens.
To ensure the air is kept close to the wearer and doesn’t escape or become diluted by external air before reaching the nose or mouth, the company moulded the visor into a shape that optimises airflow. The product is awaited with much anticipation although there have been talks of the whizzing sound that the compressor makes while running at high speed.
