Optimization and Process Design Tools for Estimation of Weekly Exposure to Air Pollution Integrating Travel Patterns during Pregnancy

A growing number of international studies have highlighted that ambient air pollution exposures are related to different health outcomes. To do so, researchers need to estimate exposure levels to air pollution throughout everyday life. In the literature, the most commonly used estimate is based on home address only or taking into account, in addition, the work address. However, several studies have shown the importance of daily mobility in the estimate of exposure to air pollutants. In this context, we developed an R procedure that estimates individual exposures combining home addresses, several important places, and itineraries of the principal mobility during a week. It supplies researchers a useful tool to calculate individual daily exposition to air pollutants weighting by the time spent at each of the most frequented locations (work, shopping, residential address, etc.) and while commuting. This task requires the efficient calculation of travel time matrices or the examination of multimodal transport routes. This procedure is freely available from the Equit’Area project website: (https://www.equitarea.org). This procedure is structured in three parts: the first part is to create a network, the second allows to estimate main itineraries of the daily mobility and the last one tries to reconstitute the level of air pollution exposure. One main advantage of the tool is that the procedure can be used with different spatial scales and for any air pollutant.