Temporal trends of radio-frequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) exposure in everyday environments across European cities

Abstract

BackgroundThe rapid development and increased use of wireless telecommunication technologies led to a substantial change of radio-frequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) exposure in the general population but little is known about temporal trends of RF-EMF in our everyday environment. ObjectivesThe objective of our study is to evaluate temporal trends of RF-EMF exposure levels in different microenvironments of three European cities using a common measurement protocol. MethodsWe performed measurements in the cities of Basel (Switzerland), Ghent and Brussels Within one year, total RF-EMF exposure levels in all outdoor areas combined increased by 57.1% (p<0.001) in Basel by 20.1% in Ghent (p=0.053) and by 38.2% (p=0.012) in Brussels Exposure increase was most consistently observed in outdoor areas due to emissions from mobile phone base stations. . In public transports RF-EMF levels tended also to increase but mostly without statistical significance.

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

“…A microenvironment is a spatial compartment where a human subject spends time and his/her personal RF-EMF exposure is evaluated for that specific duration Urbinello et al, 2014aUrbinello et al, , 2014b. The selected microenvironments were similar to those employed in various previous studies (Bolte and Eikelboom, 2012;Frei et al, 2009;Röösli et al, 2010;Urbinello et al, 2014aUrbinello et al, , 2014b. The characteristics of each microenvironment, its spatial characteristics, and the activities undertaken therein by the subject are summarized in Table 1 in Appendix A.…”

“…Urbinello et al (2014aUrbinello et al ( , 2014b have employed similar measurement duration to monitor personal exposures. A smart phone was used to monitor measurement time during the measurements; it was in flight mode to prevent it from transmitting and receiving signals during data collection.…”

“…The personal exposures from far-field RF-EMF sources, including mobile phone base stations, can be evaluated by performing personal measurements in various microenvironments using exposimeters (Dürrenberger et al, 2014;Röösli et al, 2010;Urbinello et al, 2014a). However, exposure evaluations with exposimeters still have limitations (Bhatt et al, 2015), which give rise to measurement uncertainties.…”

“…More specifically, mobile phone base stations are a dominant exposure source to the whole body in urban outdoor environments and on public transport Urbinello et al, 2014aUrbinello et al, , 2014b.…”

“…This is similar to what has occurred in Europe, including Belgium, and USA (ACMA paper, 2015;ACMA communications report, 2014). The demands of increased mobile phone signal coverage and signal capacity largely contributed to measured increases in outdoor environmental exposures of 20% to 57% in three European cities (including Gent, Belgium) over the course of one year (Urbinello et al, 2014a). Therefore, a comparative study of personal RF-EMF exposure using similar study protocols, involving countries in Europe and elsewhere was needed.…”