Measuring personal exposure from 900MHz mobile phone base stations in Australia and Belgium using a novel personal distributed exposimeter

Assessment of personal exposure from radiofrequency-electromagnetic fields in Australia and Belgium using on-body calibrated exposimeters

“…In addition, subway station/ride (urban), mountain/forest (rural) in Australia, and bicycle (rural/suburban) and car (urban/suburban) in Belgium were also measured. These microenvironments have been described more fully in our previous paper (Bhatt et al, 2016a), and were similar to those of other studies (Bolte & Eikelboom, 2012;Frei et al, 2009;Röösli et al, 2010;Urbinello et al, 2014aUrbinello et al, , 2014b. We also evaluated the indoor exposures in airports of both countries, Tullamarine International Airport, Melbourne, and Brussels International Airport, Brussels.…”

“…A smartphone watch, in flight mode, was used to monitor measurement time. The measurement intervals for the ExpoM-RFs were chosen to be 3 s (Bhatt et al, 2016a). Two ExpoM-RFs collected a total of 600 samples (300 each) per measurement for each microenvironment.…”

“…The stationary microenvironments remained fixed while the subject moved around in the microenvironment, whereas the mobile microenvironments moved around during the data collection, whilst the subject essentially remained stationary. The mobile microenvironments included bus, train, tram, car and bicycle, whereas stationary microenvironments included the rest, except for subway station and ride, which was a mixed microenvironment (Bhatt et al, 2016a).…”

“…1a). The on-body calibration procedure is discussed in detail elsewhere (Bhatt et al, 2016a). The calibration procedure was executed in a fully anechoic chamber following the procedure described in Thielens et al (2015a) and Bhatt et al (2016a) (see also appendix B).…”

“…Only limited information has been reported on environmental exposure levels from mobile phone base stations and other RF-EMF sources in Australia (Henderson et al, 2014;Henderson & Bangay, 2006;Rowley & Joyner, 2012). Furthermore, we have recently published personal exposure data from 900 MHz mobile phone base station downlink in Australia and Belgium (Bhatt et al, 2016a).…”