Release date: June 2012
New personal monitoring technology, developed by NIEHS grantees, measures exposure levels and predicts breathing rates based on movement. Since a person running or even walking breathes much faster than someone sitting on a bench, this technology could provide a more accurate assessment of how much pollution a person inhales, and help to strengthen associations between environmental exposures and disease.
A pilot study, published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, showed that the new technology accurately predicted breathing rates for most of the 22 adult participants wearing personal exposure monitors during a variety of activities.
“The exposure estimates used in past studies may not have represented the amount of pollution that actually entered the body,” said Charles Rodes, Ph.D., senior fellow at RTI International in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and senior author for the study. “The new technology could be useful for understanding how environmental exposures affect asthma and other diseases.”