Advances in personal dosimetry towards real-time dosimetry

Abstract

This objective of this paper is to give a short overview of the state-of-the-art of personal dosimetry, more specifically focussing on the advances towards real-time dosimetry. The use of active personal dosemeters has been common practice since a few decades, especially in the nuclear industry, but the large majority of the workers are still using passive personal dosemeters to monitor their doses and compare them to the legal dose limits. Besides passive personal dosimeters, many types of active personal dosemeters (APDs) exist that have equally good, or even better technical characteristics than those of passive dosemeters. Although improvements are also still needed for APDs (like for beta radiation and pulsed fields), the reason that they are not more often used for legal dosimetry has more to do with non-technical reasons, like the need to set-up a QC/QA system, and a higher cost. Recently new types of dosemeters have appeared on the market that are a mix between active and passive dosemeters. They can find their way to widespread use by being small and relatively cheap, while still offering some advantages for ALARA applications. The newest developments in personal dosimetry go in the direction of computational techniques. By using motion capture with cameras combined with fast Monte Carlo radiation transport simulations, the doses of workers can be calculated in near real time if the radiation source is known. So there are some exciting times ahead for personal dosimetry.