Can this special portable air purifier make clean air just for you?

Testing the AIRfanta 4Lite to see if it can make you safer where and when you can't wear a mask, or if it can make you safer in addition to wearing one. It is battery powered and portable, and meant to output a smooth laminar flow of purified air. The idea is for it to create a localized area of clean air in front of the unit, just for you.

Does it work? Is it practical? I ran tests to test if the AIRfanta 4Lite can be a useful layer of protection.

Spoiler: It depends on context, on what level of protection are coming from.

If you come from no mask, such as if you a patient at a dental visit, or as a HCW eating indoors in a communal break room at a hospital, it's all upside, with the 4Lite giving you maybe 2 to 15x cleaner air, if you position it just right (see the video for details). If you come from wearing a well fitted, high quality mask, like a 3M Aura N95, and decide to voluntarily take it of somewhere you normally wouldn't because you have this air purifier, you may be going from a mask that is ~100x cleaner air inside the mask down to an air purifier that outputs ~2-15x cleaner air right in front of the unit, if you use it just right. In that case, you would be loosing protection that you would have had otherwise.

(Mask fit is individual, so the amount of protection a mask gives you will vary from person to person and mask to mask.)

So before you can decide if this can help you stay safer, you need to consider what level of protection you are coming from. I'd say your best advantage is in using this in situations you were already going to be doing that don't involve taking on additional risk you wouldn't have otherwise, and not taking on additional risk..

00;00;00 Intro to the Intro
00;03;02 PortaCount real-time bench test
00;10;14 Testing on me at the desk
00;11;55 AeroTrak optical bench test
00;14;30 Fog machine visualization
00;15;55 Line laser fog visualization
00;16;26 Outro Comment

The test units were sent to me by Adam Wong, creator of AIRfanta, for review https://x.com/Engineer_Wong

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Testing notes:

I used a TSI PortaCount 8038 for the first series of tests. It measures the concentration of sub-micron particles from .02 to 1 micron in the ambient air and divides that by the concentration of the air being tested.

The second testing machine is a TSI AeroTrack it measures particles from .3 microns to 10 microns. I've only used .3 to 5 microns in the test shown.

The test on a human (well, me, pretty human) was not at the ideal, short distance (30 cm) because I can't get that short a distance with the unit on the table. It would need to be elevated to get that close to my face. But I was still within the 50cm distance in the instruction manual. This is the same issue people may have when using the air purifier as a portable device, depending on their height and where they are using it. i hope to do a more idealized test in a future video.