Wearable Passive Samplers for Assessing Environmental Exposure to Organic Chemicals: Current Approaches and Future Directions

The objective of this review is to provide an overview of wearable passive samplers as alternative tools to active samplers in environmental health research. The review highlights the advances and challenges in using wearable passive samplers for assessing personal exposure to organic chemicals and further presents a framework to enable quantitative measurements of exposure and expanded use of this monitoring approach to the population scale.Recent FindingsOverall, wearable passive samplers are promising tools for assessing personal exposure to environmental contaminants, evident by the increased adoption and use of silicone-based devices in recent years. When combined with high throughput chemical analysis, these exposure assessment tools present opportunities for advancing our ability to assess personal exposures to complex mixtures. Most designs of wearable passive samplers used for assessing exposure to semi-volatile organic chemicals are currently uncalibrated, thus, are mostly used for qualitative research. The challenge with using wearable samplers for quantitative exposure assessment mostly lies with the inherent complexity in calibrating these wearable devices. Questions remain regarding how they perform under various conditions and the uncertainty of exposure estimates. As popularity of these samplers grows, it is critical to understand the uptake kinetics of chemicals and the different environmental and meteorological conditions that can introduce variability.Summa...
Source: Current Environmental Health Reports - Category: Environmental Health Source Type: research