This novel study differentiates between environmental exposure and ‘auto-induced’ exposure (HOW a person uses their device):
‘Up until now, microenvironmental surveys have focused on measuring environmental downlink (DL) exposure from fixed site transmitters (e.g., mobile phone base stations, television/radio masts) as well as environmental uplink (UL) exposure from other user’s mobile phones (Bhatt et al., 2016a, 2016b; Sagar et al., 2018a, 2018b; Urbinello et al., 2014; Velghe et al., 2019). However, neither auto-induced UL exposure, which refers to uplink from own mobile phone, nor the auto-induced component for DL due to beamforming (Deprez et al., 2022; Aerts et al., 2021; Korkmaz et al., 2024) were previously considered. Ignoring this aspect nowadays would result in an underestimation of exposure for a typical person, who is occasionally using a mobile phone and thus generates auto-induced UL and DL’.
The authors, lead by author Adriana Fernandes Veludo, comment that ‘This data is important for epidemiological research, risk communication and risk management, but also for future dosimetry and modeling studies. Future research understanding auto-induced DL and UL exposure from more realistic case scenarios remains necessary for a better characterization of the exposure levels.’
