Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Nov 29, 2024
Date Accepted: Jun 6, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Assessment of individual exposure to multiple pollutants (noise, particulate matter, ELF-magnetic fields) related to daily life microenvironments in the Brussels Capital Region: Protocol for a cross-sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Environmental factors are responsible for 13% of annual deaths in Europe. Citizens are constantly exposed to a variety of environmental factors such as noise, air pollutants, and magnetic fields, which may interact with one another. To study multiple exposures simultaneously, data collection on individual citizens, using portable measuring devices, provides a high level of detail for exposure characterization.
Objective:
The aims of this study are to (1) assess the exposure of urban citizens to multiple pollutants: particulate matter (PM), noise, and extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MF) on a normal weekday, (2) estimate the contribution of each main microenvironment in the multiple pollutant exposures mentioned above, (3) estimate the role of measured exposure in the assessment of perceived personal exposure.
Methods:
We collected the exposure levels of 490 individuals to multiple pollutants: PM, ELF-MF, and noise levels. We used three devices per participant (Airbeam 2, Emdex II, or Lite, and a smartphone with the Aircasting application, respectively), one for each pollutant. Participants wore them for 24 hours on a normal weekday. In parallel, they filled out a microenvironment diary and a questionnaire focusing on socio-economic data, lifestyle, and perceived exposures. The analysis will first describe the exposures as daily averages and aggregated by microenvironments. Several analyses will be conducted: (1) An estimation of the contribution of each microenvironment in the exposure levels of the three pollutants studied; (2) A linear mixed model (for each pollutant) to try and explain the measured levels of exposure; (3) A linear regression to assess the contribution of the measured personal exposure in self-reported perceived exposures.
Results:
Data collection was completed in August 2022, with 490 individuals taking part. Future work will focus on data analysis.
Conclusions:
The collected data will allow us to describe the daily multiple exposures faced by individuals within the general population and to characterize the main microenvironments of their daily lives according to multiple exposures. This will help identify precise microenvironments to be targeted in policies aiming to reduce exposure to pollution. Because the sampling method is not probabilistic, it is not expected to be representative of the population of the Brussels-Capital Region but to provide a first step in the understanding of multiple exposures on individual citizens.
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