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Estimating personal exposures from a multi-hazard sensor network

Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology volume 30, pages 1013–1022 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

Occupational exposure assessment is almost exclusively accomplished with personal sampling. However, personal sampling can be burdensome and suffers from low sample sizes, resulting in inadequately characterized workplace exposures. Sensor networks offer the opportunity to measure occupational hazards with a high degree of spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we demonstrate an approach to estimate personal exposure to respirable particulate matter (PM), carbon monoxide (CO), ozone (O3), and noise using hazard data from a sensor network. We simulated stationary and mobile employees that work at the study site, a heavy-vehicle manufacturing facility. Network-derived exposure estimates compared favorably to measurements taken with a suite of personal direct-reading instruments (DRIs) deployed to mimic personal sampling but varied by hazard and type of employee. The root mean square error (RMSE) between network-derived exposure estimates and personal DRI measurements for mobile employees was 0.15 mg/m3, 1 ppm, 82 ppb, and 3 dBA for PM, CO, O3, and noise, respectively. Pearson correlation between network-derived exposure estimates and DRI measurements ranged from 0.39 (noise for mobile employees) to 0.75 (noise for stationary employees). Despite the error observed estimating personal exposure to occupational hazards it holds promise as an additional tool to be used with traditional personal sampling due to the ability to frequently and easily collect exposure information on many employees.

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Acknowledgements

This project was funded through the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) under grant number R01 OH 010533. CZ was supported by the Johns Hopkins University Education and Research Center for Occupational Safety and Health (ERC), which is funded by NIOSH under grant number T42 OH 008428, and the University of Washington’s Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Bioinformatics Training in Environmental Heath (BEBTEH), grant number T32ES015459, from the National Institute for Environmental Health Science (NIEHS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Christopher Zuidema & Kirsten Koehler

  2. Department of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences, University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, USA

    Christopher Zuidema

  3. Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Larissa V. Stebounova, Sinan Sousan, Alyson Gray & Thomas Peters

  4. Department of Public Health, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

    Sinan Sousan

  5. North Carolina Agromedicine Institute, Greenville, NC, USA

    Sinan Sousan

  6. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Oliver Stroh & Geb Thomas

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Zuidema, C., Stebounova, L.V., Sousan, S. et al. Estimating personal exposures from a multi-hazard sensor network. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 30, 1013–1022 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41370-019-0146-1

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