Using a Mobile Phone App to Identify and Assess Remaining Stocks of In Situ Asbestos in Australian Residential Settings

Abstract

Asbestos-containing materials (ACMs) were used extensively throughout much of the 20th century and can still be found in many Australian homes. Therefore, we developed a mobile application (“app”), called ACM Check, which guides users through a home inspection to identify and assess certain types of in situ ACM. A cross-sectional study was conducted using the app to collect data on the type and condition of in situ asbestos in Australian residential settings. Since being released in June 2017, we have received data for 702 home inspections. Of these, 578 (82.3%) houses contained a total of 1895 in situ materials categorised as positive for asbestos by the app. The most prevalent ACMs were used for the backing board to electrical meter boxes (50% of homes), eaves and soffit linings (44.2% of homes), and fencing (28.1% of homes). While the majority of ACMs were categorised as ‘very low’ or ‘low’ priority for removal or remediation, 6.6% of all ACMs were considered to be of ‘high’ priority. Mobile apps offer a platform to help increase people’s awareness of possible health hazards found in the residential environment, such as asbestos, while also being used to collect data for public and environmental health research.

A Data-Driven Approach to Assess the Risk of Encountering Hazardous Materials in the Building Stock Based on Environmental Inventories

“…Surprisingly, it was found that cement sheeting and waterpipe accounted for 90% of the asbestos consumption in Australia. Another study in the Australian residential buildings also showed high positive detection rates of asbestos backing board to the electrical meter boxes and asbestos eves [2]. Overall, asbestos-containing materials presented in 82.3% of the sampled houses.…”

“…Although a series of bans for the use of hazardous materials in construction have been imposed since the 1970s, an appreciable quantity of contaminated materials remains in the existing building stocks [1]. The frequent presence of asbestos-containing materials [2,3] and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls)-containing components [4] is the result of mass production and adoption in the 1920s-1990s [5]. In addition to the negative concerns of human health and the environment, demolished and renovated projects become more expensive and take a longer time if hazardous materials are encountered unexpectedly.…”

“…Similarly, statistics were also employed in study inspection reports and online demolition databases to quantify the amounts and abatement costs for asbestos-containing materials in abandoned residential dwellings by Franzblau et al [6]. Govorko et al [2,16] developed a mobile application to investigate the types and the conditions of asbestos-containing materials in residential settings.…”

Machine Learning in Hazardous Building Material Management: Research Status and Applications

“…The self-assessment questionnaire results were validated by performing accuracy tests and agreement with expert investigations before analyzing Cohen's kappa statistics [11]. Their findings highlighted the frequent presence of asbestos (82.3 %) in the residential environment [12], not far from the results (95 %) of the study by Franzblau et al [8]. Both the top-down and bottom-up research methods identified prevalent types of ACMs and prioritized remediation in residence.…”

“…Several studies have tried to develop innovative and cost-efficient methodologies to overcome the abovementioned problems. The potential of applying statistical operations in registered records [8,9], creating digital tools for field inventory [10][11][12], etc., was explored as alternative ways for supplementing the existing methods. These novel methods successfully characterized the amount and types of ACMs in residential buildings despite the different data input and collection processes.…”