Exposure assessment of one-year-old child to 3G tablet in uplink mode and to 3G femtocell in downlink mode using polynomial chaos decomposition.

So far, the assessment of the exposure of children, in the ages 0-2 years old, to relatively new radio-frequency (RF) technologies, such as tablets and femtocells, remains an open issue. This study aims to analyse the exposure of a one year-old child to these two sources, tablets and femtocells, operating in uplink (tablet) and downlink (femtocell) modes, respectively. In detail, a realistic model of an infant has been used to model separately the exposures due to (i) a 3G tablet emitting at the frequency of 1940 MHz (uplink mode) placed close to the body and (ii) a 3G femtocell emitting at 2100 MHz (downlink mode) placed at a distance of at least 1 m from the infant body. For both RF sources, the input power was set to 250 mW. The variability of the exposure due to the variation of the position of the RF sources with respect to the infant body has been studied by stochastic dosimetry, based on polynomial chaos to build surrogate models of both whole-body and tissue specific absorption rate (SAR), which makes it easy and quick to investigate the exposure in a full range of possible positions of the sources. The major outcomes of the study are: (1) the maximum values of the whole-body SAR (WB SAR) have been found to be 9.5 mW kg(-1) in uplink mode and 65 µW kg(-1) in downlink mode, i.e. within the limits of the ICNIRP 1998 Guidelines; (2) in both uplink and downlink mode the highest SAR values were approximately found in the same tissues, i.e. in the skin, eye and penis for the whole-tissue SAR and in the bone, skin and muscle for the peak SAR; (3) the change in the position of both the 3G tablet and the 3G femtocell significantly influences the infant exposure.

Polynomial Chaos decomposition applied to stochastic dosimetry: study of the influence of the magnetic field orientation on the pregnant woman exposure at 50 Hz.

Polynomial Chaos (PC) is a decomposition method used to build a meta-model, which approximates the unknown response of a model. In this paper the PC method is applied to the stochastic dosimetry to assess the variability of human exposure due to the change of the orientation of the B-field vector respect to the human body. In detail, the analysis of the pregnant woman exposure at 7 months of gestational age is carried out, to build-up a statistical meta-model of the induced electric field for each fetal tissue and in the fetal whole-body by means of the PC expansion as a function of the B-field orientation, considering a uniform exposure at 50 Hz.

Modelling of deep transcranial magnetic stimulation: different coil configurations.

This paper provides a characterization of the induced electric field distributions in the brain of a realistic human model due to 16 different coil configurations. We used the scalar potential finite element method to calculate the induced electric field distributions differentiating the brain structures, e.g. cortex, white matter, cerebellum, thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, pons and midbrain. We found that, despite the presence of a depth-focality tradeoff, some configurations are able to reach subcortical white matter tracts at effective electric field level.

Computational model of cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation.

This work aimed to estimate the distribution of the electric field and current density generated by cerebellar tDCS using electromagnetics computational techniques applied to a realistic human models of different ages and gender. Results show that the stronger electric field and current density occur mainly in the cerebellar cortex, with a spread toward the occipital region of the cortex, while the current spread to other structures is negligible. Moreover, changes of about 1 cm in the position of the scalp electrode delivering tDCS did not influence the E and J distribution in the cerebellum.

Estimate of the fetal temperature increase due to UHF RFID exposure.

Exposure from electromagnetic (EM) devices has increased during the last decades due to the rapid development of new technologies. Among them, radiofrequency identification (RFID) applications are used in almost every aspect of everyday life, which could expose people unselectively. This scenario could pose potential risks for certain groups of general population, such as pregnant women, who are more sensitive to thermal effects produced by EM exposure. In this paper, the temperature rise at the steady state in two pregnant women models exposed to UHF RFID has been assessed. Results show that heating of tissues is far from the threshold of biological effects indicated by radiation protection guidelines.