New Methods for Personal Exposure Monitoring for Airborne Particles

Abstract

Airborne particles have been associated with a range of adverse cardiopulmonary outcomes, which has driven its monitoring at stationary, central sites throughout the world. Individual exposures, however, can differ substantially from concentrations measured at central sites due to spatial variability across a region and sources unique to the individual, such as cooking or cleaning in homes, traffic emissions during commutes, and widely varying sources encountered at work. Personal monitoring with small, battery-powered instruments enables the measurement of an individual’s exposure as they go about their daily activities. Personal monitoring can substantially reduce exposure misclassification and improve the power to detect relationships between particulate pollution and adverse health outcomes. By partitioning exposures to known locations and sources, it may be possible to account for variable toxicity of different sources. This review outlines recent advances in the field of personal exposure assessment for particulate pollution. Advances in battery technology have improved the feasibility of 24-hour monitoring, providing the ability to more completely attribute exposures to microenvironment (e.g., work, home, commute). New metrics to evaluate the relationship between particulate matter and health are also being considered, including particle number concentration, particle composition measures, and particle oxidative load. Such metrics provide opportunities to develop more precise associations between airborne particles and health and may provide opportunities for more effective regulations.

Effects of personal air pollution exposure on asthma symptoms, lung function and airway inflammation

“…However, Cairclip NO 2 was still in development when our study commenced and is less well validated than Cairclip NO 2 /O 3 . There are now a number of sensors in development or commercially available, measuring either particulate matter or gaseous pollutants, which may be used in future personal exposure studies. It is likely that the measurement properties of these sensors will continue to improve as technology develops.…”

Laboratory Comparison of Low-Cost Particulate Matter Sensors to Measure Transient Events of Pollution

“…The issues above mentioned are attributed to the sensing mechanism, which relies on Mie scattering [31], and due to this, the method works best for particle diameters larger than the wavelength of the incident light, typically a few hundred nanometers. This excludes ultrafine particles from the measurement, which may be key in driving adverse health effects, while only representing a small proportion of the mass of PM.…”

Trade-offs of Personal Versus More Proxy Exposure Measures in Environmental Epidemiology

“…: technologies to measure an individual’s breathing zone air pollution, 1 semivolatile organic compounds on silicone wrist bands, 2,3 and biomarkers of exposure in smaller amounts of biosample (e.g. blood, urine).…”