What is Bionic Breathware, and why it is a leap forward for safer breathing. Story of a journey across tech-frontiers.
What we breathe matters, we got reminded the hard way… It’s time to win over inertia, pause fancying Mars runaways, and push a new technology that can boost individual and collective resiliency against airborne threats. For many in 2021 this isn’t just an option, but a life-call.
Dry statistics at hand, one might observe that COVID-19 has de facto split society in two: a lucky-majority, impacted only indirectly by the social and economic effects of restrictions and lockdowns and an unlucky-minority, frontally hit by severe disease, impairment, death, family losses and/or extreme poverty, mixed in a spectrum of dark shades.
This view hides an obvious mystification. COVID-19’s impact on health and society does in fact propagate (and further will) indirectly in many directions with a giant domino effect. Attempts to quantify the aggregated health and economic burden at global scale will take years, with partial figures looking terrifying enough… [1–4].
Key driver behind the rapidity and scale of this pandemic, one mechanism hard to miss at this point: the short-range airborne transmission via human aerosols acting as efficient ‘random’ channel [5–7].
With official mortality of COVID-19 exceeding on Feb 2021, the quota of two millions deaths over twelve months [8], the isolated proportion of what appears as enormous airborne-boosted catastrophe might conceal a broader truth. Average yearly estimates of W.H.O. quantify in approximately seven millions [9] the number of worldwide victims of diseases caused by air pollution and contamination. So, COVID-19’s direct death toll is sadly a fraction of the yearly mortality ‘normally’ caused by other airborne threats.
The disruptive power of these figures, pointing at air as neglected core element of our daily life, pushed our commitment towards achieving a real breakthrough in personal breathing safety.
So we said airborne. Let us step back to early 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19. Emerita W.H.O. had just woken up from a long winter sleep for recommending people (who already started wearing masks) to wear masks! [10.a].
Back then, the brain of a industrial scientist then converted to startups (me), bothered by under-oxygenation and C02 re-breathing of a 2€-worth N95 mask, stumbled repeatedly on a trivial but haunting paradox. Once deciphered, that might read:
“..we’re landing rovers on Mars and we can’t do any better than suffocating in this ‘imperfect’ [10.b] passive, leaking ‘patch’ ?! You must be kidding me..”
It took a while to figure out why humanity seemed to hang on such a primitive stage of breathing safety, but the answers opened new horizons. As it often happens, most pieces of this complex puzzle were scrambled around, so the job was to assemble them the right way. However, without the right cross- & multi-disciplinary mindset and skills, outcomes other than frustration seemed unlikely. That’s where my 20 years of cutting-edge photonics, nanotech, robotics and computer science (EU, US) turned out crucial.
Air. We breathe matter of four main types: gases, dry particles (metals, organics), aerosol droplets and microbiomes (bacteria and viruses); they are found in a neat phase and in their mixed-combinations. Objects in the air range in size from sub-nanometer scale to a few tens of micrometers. For instance, the virus of SARS-CoV-2 has a typical size in the range 50 nm — 200 nm [11, 12], which makes it nasty to handle, even if you’re at ease in nanotech. The physical properties of matter in the air cross-convolute into a broad spectrum of dynamic effects and interactions. It is by harnessing fluid dynamics, photonics and robotics, that we created a whole ‘air-lab at the bottom’, where the game can be won.
Filling a tech-void. Looking at breathware systems available, they address either vague personal use or professional applications, each dealing specifically with selective air treatment. A closer look revealed that humans thought they had covered (almost) everything, except the one thing: pandemics. When COVID-19 started rampaging, only equipment suitable for the job was therefore a sort of ‘resident-evil-style’ containment suites, unthinkable for 99.99% of people and real life situations on the planet. We also realized, the obstacles traditional protective personal equipment (PPE) manufacturers would face moving into cross-disciplinary fields far from the long-known application and market segments they routinely knew.
Hence, the lockdowns we’re looping into are the consequence of a stunning tech-void: meaningful icon of a global hypertrophic, short-sighted collectivity. The joke “don’t forget to breathe”, should have been “don’t forget WHAT you breathe..”. We DID forget, indeed!
The weapon. For over a decade scientists all over the planet have been irradiating microbiomes in labs [13], with opportune doses of UV-C light capable of damaging their genome and inactivate dangerous ones (UVGI). So why don’t we use that? Indeed UVGI technology is already in use to disinfect ambient air in rooms (e.g. hospitals) or deactivate biofilms on surfaces; but that’s not how you can stop raging pandemics. Again, it was just striking how a possible pandemic outbreak hadn’t been taken seriously, neither by industry nor by health institutions developing and using UV-C technology.
Clearly, the mission wasn’t trivial at all. But the challenge wasn’t one you can turn your back to — almost any family has members particularly exposed to COVID-19... It took a small team and finest R&D madness to design a solution of a micro-irradiation chamber offering an new edge over airborne threats, including SARS-CoV-2. The unit named B.H.IR.C. (Ballistic-Hell IRradiation Chamber, patent pending) was born, enabling real-time air disinfection with cost and size of a consumer electronics wearable. A new heart was there, but not yet a suitable body…
Bionic Breathware. We felt it was THE time for a new synthesis to emerge. It took ten months of hard work for a handful of pioneers mastering photonics, robotics and HPC computer simulations. The new system, named V-IGO.1 Bionic Breathware® was prototyped. Capable of active, triple-action air processing (aerosol treatment, particle filtering and UV-C disinfection) its core unit is a wearable, lightweight device, the size of a mobile phone. It is designed for continuous air-UVGI at doses suitable for SARS-CoV-2 virus inactivation. Connected to a tight-fitting face-mask and AI-powered microcontroller, designed for high-end performance and safety specifications, the platform processes both inhaled and exhaled tidal streams. V-IGO.1 is the only personal breathware targeting I.B.D. (Interpersonal Breathing Decoupling), for extended daily life uses such as office work, public transport, sports as well as home and caregiving environments. The system can be also combined with common FFP2 face masks, whenever required. A special version of the system can be assembled from kits, enabling low-cost, decentralized production models.
What about size and comfort? V-IGO.1 Bionic Breathware® is the only multi-action air-processing platform, the size of a smartphone. ‘Invisible’ if worn under the clothes by a ligthweight harness, its adaptivity, analytics and diagnostic features make it symbiotic, enhancing the user’s safety AND breathing comfort.
Racing it to people. Help is good, when it comes in time. Based on the current state of COVID-19 pandemic (March 2021), we’re working hard to channel Bionic Breathware to Europe asap! We are adopting a collaborative strategy for accelerating development and deployment to most vulnerable groups, threatened by a long-tail and possibly endemic phase of the virus. The scale-up production model departs from an inefficient centralized scheme, unfolding through the formation of national consortia (partnership of industry, academia and public sector) fed by a tech-licensing scheme.
European consortia. Teaming up with European partners it’s a real priority, so we’re launching the first European Bionic Breathware Call (EBBC), targeting the formation of first three national EU-consortia. Companies, institutions and private citizens interested in joining to accelerate development and distribution of Bionic Breathware are encouraged to contact us: contact-v@bionic-breathware.eu.
We’re working to release the first limited-series of V-IGO.1 Bionic Breathware by the end of April, to selected testers upon pre-ordering. After, a rapid scale-up of production is planned through manufacturing consortia in EU.
Take a new breathe, leap forward!
Author. Dr. Mauro Morana, email: mmorana@bionic-breathware.eu Published on: March 14th 2021.
References
[1] Welfens, Paul J. J.. “Macroeconomic and health care aspects of the coronavirus epidemic: EU, US and global perspectives.” International Economics and Economic Policy, 1–68. 23 May. 2020, doi:10.1007/s10368–020–00465–3
[2] Eurostat — Impact of COVID-19 on main GDP aggregates including employment
[3] ILO-OECD paper prepared at the request of G20 LeadersSaudi Arabia’s G20 Presidency 2020
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00277-8
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02058-1
[7] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76442-2
[8] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[9] https://www.who.int/news-room/air-pollution
[10.a] April 2020, WHO interim guidance: WHO-2019-nCov-IPC_Masks-2020.3-eng
[10.b] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html
[11] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7224694/
