With advances in technology, there are an increasing number of direct-reading instruments available to occupational health and safety professionals to evaluate occupational aerosol exposures. Despite the wide array of direct-reading instruments available to professionals, the adoption of direct-reading technology to monitor workplace exposures has been limited, partly due to a lack of knowledge on how the instruments operate, how to select an appropriate instrument, and challenges in data analysis techniques. This paper presents a review of direct-reading aerosol instruments available to occupational health and safety professionals, describes the principles of operation, guides instrument selection based on the workplace and exposure, and discusses data analysis techniques to overcome these barriers to adoption. This paper does not cover all direct-reading instruments for aerosols but only those that an occupational health and safety professional could use in a workplace to evaluate exposures. Therefore, this paper focuses on instruments that have the most potential for workplace use due to their robustness, past workplace use, and price with regard to return on investment. The instruments covered in this paper include those that measure aerosol number concentration, mass concentration, and aerosol size distributions.
Keywords: Aerosols; analyzing data; direct-reading instruments; optical particle counters; real-time monitors.