Features and Practicability of the Next-Generation Sensors and Monitors for Exposure Assessment to Airborne Pollutants: A Systematic Review

Abstract

In the last years, the issue of exposure assessment of airborne pollutants has been on the rise, both in the environmental and occupational fields. Increasingly severe national and international air quality standards, indoor air guidance values, and exposure limit values have been developed to protect the health of the general population and workers; this issue required a significant and continuous improvement in monitoring technologies to allow the execution of proper exposure assessment studies. One of the most interesting aspects in this field is the development of the “next-generation” of airborne pollutants monitors and sensors (NGMS). The principal aim of this review is to analyze and characterize the state of the art and of NGMS and their practical applications in exposure assessment studies. A systematic review of the literature was performed analyzing outcomes from three different databases (Scopus, PubMed, Isi Web of Knowledge); a total of 67 scientific papers were analyzed. The reviewing process was conducting systematically with the aim to extrapolate information about the specifications, technologies, and applicability of NGMSs in both environmental and occupational exposure assessment. The principal results of this review show that the use of NGMSs is becoming increasingly common in the scientific community for both environmental and occupational exposure assessment. The available studies outlined that NGMSs cannot be used as reference instrumentation in air monitoring for regulatory purposes, but at the same time, they can be easily adapted to more specific applications, improving exposure assessment studies in terms of spatiotemporal resolution, wearability, and adaptability to different types of projects and applications. Nevertheless, improvements needed to further enhance NGMSs performances and allow their wider use in the field of exposure assessment are also discussed.

A New Wearable System for Sensing Outdoor Environmental Conditions for Monitoring Hyper-Microclimate

“…The standard method to measure PM concentrations is the gravimetric method, that is, sampling PM on filters and weighing them before and after the collection, and it is usually presented in daily values as the PM collection occurs in a period of nominally 24 h [67]. For continuous monitoring, laser scattering processes are one of the most used techniques to measure PM concentrations [68].…”

Evolution and Applications of Recent Sensing Technology for Occupational Risk Assessment: A Rapid Review of the Literature

“…NGMSs ("next-generation" monitors and sensors), which refers to "miniaturized" and/or "wearable" sensors and/or monitors, are expected to make the exposure and risk assessment in occupational settings more convenient and comprehensive [4]. A recent systematic review [8] analyzed the use of NGMSs in occupational hygiene for airborne hazards: results outlined that these applications are less frequent than in environmental hygiene, and this is probably due to the fact that policy-and legislation-based decisions requires a high-level detection limit for data, precision, accuracy, and completeness [9]. Despite that, NGMSs devices can provide new resources in the occupational-safety and health-management fields [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

User-Centred Design of a Final Results Report for Participants in Multi-Sensor Personal Air Pollution Exposure Monitoring Campaigns

“…The rise of low-cost personal air monitoring devices has enabled scientists to involve citizens in air quality monitoring programmes. The small size of these devices, their low cost, high temporal resolution for data capture and internet connectivity for remote access facilitates their use in large scale studies of multiple stressors [1,2]. It is known that personal exposure to air pollution depends on individual trajectories and activities [3], and exposure studies have demonstrated the need for data with a high spatio-temporal resolution in order to obtain a rigorous personal exposure assessment [4,5].…”