Stochastic Dosimetry applied for the Assessment of Children Exposure Variability to Near-Field Sources in the ELFSTAT project

This work is performed in the context of the ELFSTAT project, founded by the French ANSES (2015-2019, Grant agreement n. 2015/1/202), which aims at characterizing children's exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MF) in real exposure scenarios using stochastic approaches. Since also domestic appliances could be relevant for the children level exposure to ELF- MF, this work aims to assess the exposure variability due to near-field sources, not limiting it only on some worst-case exposure scenario. More in details, in this paper the exposure of a child to a hairdryer model is evaluated using a stochastic dosimetry approach based on the Polynomial Chaos theory (PC). The electric field amplitudes induced in specific tissues composing the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system (following the ICNIRP guidelines) were analyzed. The results highlight a high exposure variability depending on the near-field source position in respect with the child head.