Assessing exposure factors in the smartphone generation: Design and evaluation of a smartphone app that collects use patterns of cosmetics and household chemicals

作者：Natalie Von Goetz^*; Elena Garcia Hidalgo; Charles Balachandran; Klaus Fuchs; Remo Frey; Alexander Ilic

来源：Food and Chemical Toxicology, 2018, 118: 532-540.

DOI：10.1016/j.fct.2018.05.060

• Representativeness
• Performance
• Cost efficiency
• Mobile app

Exposure factors form the basis of reliable exposure estimates. The growing demand for population-specific exposure factors for complex exposure models is challenged by continuously declining response rates in surveys: Current survey methods clearly need a boost by user-friendly and efficient technologies. We compared the performance of a smartphone app to a paper questionnaire based on a survey on exposure factors that offered the choice between both methods and based on an observational study that investigated the performance of both methods.
The development costs for smartphone app and paper questionnaire were comparable with 15'000 and 13'500 US$, respectively. The cost efficiency for the paper questionnaire was much better than for the app, but model calculations show that the cost efficiency of the app improves considerably with adequate promotion and for larger surveys, especially for those with regular repetitions. Barcode scanning of consumer products by app saved time and effort of the participants and enhanced reliability. The app was able to attract the attention of younger adults between 20 and 40 years old: Thus, the limited representativity for younger age groups that sometimes is observed for paper-based surveys may be enhanced by including the option to use an app in a mixed-mode survey.

• 出版日期2018-8