Wearable Microsystem for Continuous Personalized Aerosol Exposure Assessment

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Project Summary / Abstract Exposure to air pollution consistently ranks among the leading global causes of illness and death, a majority of which can be attributed to airborne particulate matter (PM) pollution. The lack of effective interventions are due in large part to our inability to properly characterize and quantify air pollutants with the spatial and temporal resolution that represents personal exposures. Most existing tools for monitoring air pollution are incapable of accurately measuring exposures to multiple pollutants or the variability of pollutant chemical composition within and across individual microenvironments, time of day, personal lifestyles, etc. The long term goal of our team is to establish an infrastructure for real-time, continuous, multi-pollutant, air quality monitoring with very high spatial and temporal resolution, enabling groundbreaking environmental health research leading to effective, personalized, exposure analytics and interventions to ultimately reduce exposures to air pollutants and improve overall public health. In Phase 1 of this effort, we have developed wearable technologies for continuous gaseous air pollutant monitoring under an ongoing grant. Herein, we propose Phase 2 development of wearable technologies for continuous airborne particulate monitoring. The objective of this renewal application is to develop a wearable system that can, in real time, quantify size-fractionated PM across two orders of hydrodynamic diameter (~2.5µm to 50nm) and classify health-critical elemental components of PM, trace metals and elemental carbon. This cost effective system could be distributed over a network of users, gathering real- time data while mobile in the environment, over a wide spatial distribution, with high spatial and temporal resolution. Moreover, by time tagging this data with environmental (temperature, humidity, etc.) and physical (location, activity, etc.) parameters, our system would permit an unprecedentedly information rich dataset for offline analysis and health impact modeling, as well as for personal exposure management at the individual user level. The Specific Aims of this project are to: 1) Develop and characterize a miniaturized system for real-time PM capture and size fractionation (accomplished by development of a miniaturized component to capture airborne PM in a liquid, followed by a microfluidic component that separates the PM into five size bins); 2) Develop and characterize a miniaturized system for real-time PM quantification and elemental component classification (accomplished by capacitively counting particles within each size bin followed by electrochemical classification of trace metal and elemental carbon components); and 3) Evaluate the new PM monitoring system for community health studies in real world environments (accomplished by field testing and evaluation against stationary federal reference methods for PM mass and chemical composition, followed by a community exposure assessment study to characterize the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of air pollutants across disparate communities of health burden and risk within the Detroit urban area).