International. Electrolux's Pure A9 is an IoT-connected air purifier built with Microsoft Azure.
To present the system, Microsoft narrated a successful experience:
Acrylic smoke, carried by stiff breezes from a nearby fire in a carport filled Electrolux's campus in Stockholm, Sweden, recently.
Some developers and executives felt their throats burning. At least one employee had trouble breathing. He decided to return home. But before he did, he stopped inside the building where Andreas Larsson and his team were testing the Pure A9. The time had come to see what the new device could do in extreme conditions.
"We had 10 or 15 Pure A9 air purifiers and turned them all on," recalls Larsson, director of engineering at Electrolux. "That achieved a significant change in air quality. We asked him to come to our office, sit down and work from there. He took a deep breath several times. I was happy. He stayed there the rest of the day."
The Pure A9, launched in March in four Nordic countries in addition to Switzerland, and previously in Korea, removes ultra-fine particles of dust, contaminants, bacteria, allergens and bad odors from indoor rooms.
By linking the purifier and its associated application to the cloud, Electrolux can display air quality data, indoors and outdoors, to product users in real time while tracking indoor air improvement over time. In addition, the Pure A9 continuously monitors the use of its filter, to alert users when it is time to order a replacement filter.
And as a connected device, the Pure A9 could eventually have the ability to learn the daily patterns of when home occupants are usually away, to allow the device to run on its own in a smart agenda, Larsson says.
"If we can predict when the home is empty, we make sure the filter isn't wasted by cleaning the air that no one is going to breathe," Larsson says. "Then we can start purification so that the air is clean when you get home."
The launch of the Pure A9 marks a new phase in Electrolux's push to bring connected appliances to "millions of homes around the world, to shape a better life for consumers," Larsson said.
He calls it the company's "wellness path to IoT, software products, data and applications," a process that began two years ago with a robotic, cloud-connected vacuum cleaner called the Pure i9.
Source: Microsoft.
