ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with personal air quality monitors, small devices people can carry with them through their daily activities that will sample the air they are breathing. Personal monitors are the “gold standard” for estimating human exposure to air pollutants. In no other way can we measure the changing concentrations as persons go from their houses to their cars to their workplaces over the course of a day. The development of personal monitors for measuring environmental pollutants began in the 1970s and continues today. The chapter provides the seldom-told history of how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) responded to the National Academy of Sciences recommendation to “foster development” of personal monitors. Early pioneers in developing monitors for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), pesticides, carbon monoxide (CO), and particles are recognized. (Current technologies are also described, such as the new “multipollutant personal monitor” developed at Harvard.) Only brief attention is paid to the results of the large-scale studies using these monitors, because these findings are treated at greater length in accompanying chapters on these pollutants. But the monitors themselves are illustrated profusely.
