# Wearable Microsystem for Continuous Personalized Aerosol Exposure Assessment

> **NIH NIH R01** · MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $598,592

## Abstract

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
asses...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10316689
- **Project number:** 1R01ES033515-01
- **Recipient organization:** MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Joseph Timothy Dvonch
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $598,592
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-09-21 → 2026-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10316689

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10316689, Wearable Microsystem for Continuous Personalized Aerosol Exposure Assessment (1R01ES033515-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10316689. Licensed CC0.

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