Abstract
In the last years, the issue of exposure assessment of airborne pollutants has been on the rise, both in the environmental and occupational fields. Increasingly severe national and international air quality standards, indoor air guidance values, and exposure limit values have been developed to protect the health of the general population and workers; this issue required a significant and continuous improvement in monitoring technologies to allow the execution of proper exposure assessment studies. One of the most interesting aspects in this field is the development of the “next-generation” of airborne pollutants monitors and sensors (NGMS). The principal aim of this review is to analyze and characterize the state of the art and of NGMS and their practical applications in exposure assessment studies. A systematic review of the literature was performed analyzing outcomes from three different databases (Scopus, PubMed, Isi Web of Knowledge); a total of 67 scientific papers were analyzed. The reviewing process was conducting systematically with the aim to extrapolate information about the specifications, technologies, and applicability of NGMSs in both environmental and occupational exposure assessment. The principal results of this review show that the use of NGMSs is becoming increasingly common in the scientific community for both environmental and occupational exposure assessment. The available studies outlined that NGMSs cannot be used as reference instrumentation in air monitoring for regulatory purposes, but at the same time, they can be easily adapted to more specific applications, improving exposure assessment studies in terms of spatiotemporal resolution, wearability, and adaptability to different types of projects and applications. Nevertheless, improvements needed to further enhance NGMSs performances and allow their wider use in the field of exposure assessment are also discussed.
Highlights
All the mobile apps that can communicate with monitors or sensors and are used to download and manage measurement data, without the necessity of a cable connection, were considered (Section 3.2)
Few papers have cited this type of technology, but it could be an important future development to help operators during the acquisition data phase
This review focused on the following pollutants: nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and airborne particulate matter (PM) with an aerodynamic diameter below 2.5 μm (PM2.5) and below 10 μm (PM10) (Table 2)
Summary
These networks consist of fixed monitoring stations located throughout the territory (in urban and suburban areas, typically) These fixed-site stations are, as a rule, equipped with reference-grade instrumentation, and can provide accurate and precise data for a general-purpose (i.e., verifying the compliance with regulations), but cannot accurately describe the variability of single citizens’ exposure to airborne pollutants with a high spatial and temporal resolution [12]. Research studies linking personal exposure to airborne pollutants with subjects’ specific variables (e.g., performed activities, visited micro-environments, modes of transport, other individual behaviors and customs) are made possible only if it is possible to promptly collect the information (both exposure level and contextual information) of individual patterns [17,18] These studies have already been conducted with portable monitors in the past few years, but the information collected may become even more comprehensive if the monitoring activity could be effectively extended
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