This new Samsung electronic mask can help you breathe cleaner air

We’ve covered a lot on hardware or wearables that could make our lives easier, like Microsoft’s new AI-powered backpack, but Samsung is now taking it even further. The South Korean tech giant has been working on a new electronic mask, equipped with chips inside it, and it can help you breathe cleaner air.

According to the 32-page document, you can control this wearable electronic mask via a mobile app. The app shows pieces of information from the mask like the grade of the filter currently in it, its batteries, how fast the fan is spinning, how long you’ve been using the mask, how much clean air you’ve gotten, and other breathing-related info.

Here’s how the mobile app looks like (supposedly):

The premise of this high-tech mask seems so simple. It has filters (like MA-60, MA-80, or MA-94) to clean the air you breathe. To get there, you have sensors in all corners of the filters to gradually check how dirty the filters are and a fan to help you breathe easier. Then, a processor makes automatic decisions for the mask based on the sensor data. 

The filter has patterns on its edges, like dots or lines, labeled as first to fourth patterns. These patterns are colored differently, like red or blue, depending on the filter’s grade. So, when the system detects these colors using sensors, it can figure out the filter’s grade based on the colors it sees.

And then, based on data from the sensors, the high-tech wearable mask will then adjust the fan’s speed. If the filters are really dirty, the fan spins faster to clean the air better. If they’re not so dirty, they spin slower to save the mask’s battery energy.

As a result, you get this fresh, crisp air that’s already filtered, with a fan inside your mask when you breathe. You can also use it when doing physical exercises as it’s not too suffocating, and you can switch the mask’s filter from the app to something lighter.

Samsung had actually filed a patent for this wearable tech a little while ago last year, but the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has just recently published the document in late March this year. 

And if you may recall, tech company Razer also built its own “world’s smartest mask” a little while ago back in 2021. It’s transparent and has cool RGB lightning, which honestly looks pretty neat but isn’t as pleasant when worn for long-term use throughout everyday life.