Assessment of Individual Exposure to Multiple Pollutants (Noise, Particulate Matter, and Extremely Low-Frequency Magnetic Fields) Related to Daily Life Microenvironments in the Brussels Capital Region: Protocol for a Cross-Sectional Study.

Background: Environmental factors are responsible for 13% of annual deaths in Europe. Citizens are constantly exposed to a variety of environmental factors, such as noise, air pollutants, and magnetic fields (MFs), which may interact with one another. To study multiple-pollutant exposures simultaneously, data on individual citizens, collected using portable measuring devices, provide a high level of detail for exposure characterization.

Objective: The aims of this study are to (1) assess the exposure of urban citizens to multiple pollutants (noise, particulate matter [PM], and extremely low-frequency magnetic fields [ELF-MFs]) on a normal weekday, (2) estimate the contribution of each main daily life microenvironment in the multiple-pollutant exposure, and (3) estimate the role of measured exposure in the assessment of perceived personal exposure.

Methods: We collected the exposure levels of 490 individuals to multiple pollutants: PM, ELF-MFs, and noise levels. We used 3 devices per participant (Airbeam 2, EMDEX II or EMDEX Lite, and a smartphone with the Aircasting app for PM, ELF-MFs, and noise, respectively). Participants wore them for 24 hours on a normal weekday. In parallel, they filled out a microenvironment diary and a questionnaire focusing on socioeconomic data, lifestyle, and perceived exposures. The analysis will first describe the exposures as daily averages and aggregated by microenvironment. Several analyses will be conducted: (1) an estimation of the contribution of each microenvironment in the exposure levels of the 3 pollutants studied, (2) a linear mixed model (for each pollutant) to explain the measured levels of exposure, and (3) linear regression to assess the contribution of the measured personal exposure in self-reported perceived exposures.

Results: Data collection was carried out from October 2020 to August 2022, with 490 individuals taking part. The databases have been gathered and cleaned. Future work will focus on data analysis.

Conclusions: The collected data will allow us to describe the daily multiple-pollutant exposures faced by individuals within the general population and to characterize the main microenvironments of their daily lives according to multiple-pollutant exposures. This will help identify precise microenvironments to be targeted in policies aiming to reduce exposure to pollution. Because the sampling method is not probabilistic, it is not expected to be representative of the population of the Brussels Capital Region, but it will provide a first step in the understanding of multiple-pollutant exposures faced by individual citizens.

International Registered Report Identifier (irrid): DERR1-10.2196/69407.