Bio3Air, an integrative system for monitoring individual-level air pollutant exposure with high time and spatial resolution

Abstract

Background: Air pollution is a leading cause of global disease burden. Lack of suitable methods for long term measuring exposure level at individual level is crippling environmental epidemiology research of air pollution.

Methods: We report an integrative system, Bio³Air, for long term measurement of individual level air pollution exposure, currently focusing on ambient particulate matter (PM). The novel system in real-time quantifies individual's outdoor/indoor status, geological location, lung ventilation rate and PM concentration of individual's surrounding environment, and these metrics are subsequently incorporated in calculating PM exposure.

Results: The system is fully developed and tested in China, USA and Canada, and has been successfully applied in epidemiology study. Bio³Air offers high reliability, sensitivity, reproducibility (>99%) and accuracy. It has high time- and spatial- resolution (≤ 2 min and ≤ 20 m, respectively). Bio³Air achieved 91.89% consistency with "gold-standard" method (membrane collection and off-line analysis).

Conclusions: Bio³Air represents a substantial methodological advance in environmental health research of air pollution. It captures information relevant in measuring individual's PM exposure (e.g. real-time outdoor/indoor status, location and lung ventilation rate). Such information is typically missed by conventional approaches. Additional features of Bio³Air include easy-to-use, cost-effectiveness and automated data collection, making it a powerful tool facilitating studies of air pollution exposure and health consequences.

Keywords: Ambient particulate matter; Environmental health; Individual-level exposure measurement; Smartphone application; Time and spatial resolution.