Aerts S, Vermeeren G, Van den Bossche M, Aminzadeh R, Verloock L, Thielens A, Leroux P, Bergs J, Braem B, Philippron A, Martens L, Joseph W. Lessons Learned from a Distributed RF-EMF Sensor Network. Sensors (Basel). 2022 Feb 22;22(5):1715. doi: 10.3390/s22051715. PMID: 35270862; PMCID: PMC8914968.
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/5/1715/htm
In this study, ten RF sensor nodes were installed on building façades in an urban environment in the city centre of Antwerp, Belgium, with an area of 0.11 km2. Between 146 thousand and 1.307 million samples (per 30 s) were collected per sensor and per frequency band over 475 days between January 2019 and May 2020.
In summary, this paper offers invaluable insights applicable to future designs and deployments of distributed RF-EMF sensor networks: from the initial deployment (e.g., the sensor placement and density) to the trade-off between the sampling rate and the total measuring period (e.g., in the case of battery-powered sensors). Finally, various techniques are proposed to improve the spatiotemporal assessment of RF-EMF exposure in large geographical areas, such as nomadic sensors, optimized temporal profiles, time-series clustering, and spatiotemporal interpolation techniques. In the future, these techniques will be verified in a larger RF-EMF sensing network.