Development of a Route of Exposure Model Using Silicone Wristbands as Personal Samplers

Project Summary The major goal of this SBIR is to overcome critical barriers to wide-spread adoption and market expansion of Silicone Wristbands (SWBs) as a tool for highly personalized environmental monitoring. SWBs represent a recent research-based sampling approach in over 70 publications representing 1000s of participants and 100s of detected chemicals but is not available to the consumer market. Using SWBs is appealing because they are easy to wear, have a wide range of potential capture, and do not require training, energy, or maintenance. However, there are several key problems that need to be addressed: 1. The cost of analysis is currently too high to expand to the consumer market. One way to reduce costs and lower prices is to focus chemical analyses on high impact compounds that are detected frequently and of high interest (toxicologically and topically). 2. The effect and magnitude of skin and air exposures when reporting chemical data from SWBs is not well understood. This makes SWB data communication challenging, and back-calculations to compare against published benchmarks (OSHA/EPA/etc.) or other published data difficult. 3. The complexity of wristband data poses novel challenges for reporting results back to researchers, let alone people with less exposure science experience in the consumer market. The range and complexity of chemical exposures that can be measured represent challenges that must be addressed to provide meaningful information for all potential users of the technology. The proposed application describes using real-world SWB data to validate chemical lists of high interest compounds as well as models developed in Phase I to help predict dominant routes of exposure. Additionally for Phase II, we will gather real-world feedback to finalize chemical exposure reports suitable to a wide audience. SWBs will be used in paired configurations (“traditional” and “air-only”) that will distinguish routes of exposure and be analyzed for over 1500 chemical compounds including volatiles, pesticides, flame retardants, phthalates, fragrances, and food-related chemicals. There are four Aims to this proposal: 1) validate a focused chemical list from internal data and Phase I to simplify a new and cheaper chemical analysis, 2) determine if dermal contact is a significant proportion of chemical exposure through a field demonstration among 300 individuals , 3) optimize and validate predictive exposure models, and 4) create a new chemical exposure report with the help of expert partners like ICF and Silent Spring. With up to 600 samples screened for over 1500 organic chemicals and report feedback from 300 individuals, these datasets will address critical research goals and create new markets and opportunities.