Publicaties

On April 2020, Google and Apple announced the launch of a joint project: a system that promised to contribute to break COVID-19 contagion chains, called Exposure Notifications (EN). Countries around the world integrated EN within their public healthcare systems. This paper provides a critical inquiry on the legal and technical architecture of EN from a data protection law (DP) point of view. It is divided in two parts. In the first part we ...

Several studies have shown that a significant amount of daily air pollution exposure is inhaled during trips. In this study, car drivers assessed their own black carbon exposure under real-life conditions (223 h of data from 2013). The spatiotemporal exposure of the car drivers is modeled using a data science approach, referred to as “microscopic land-use regression” (µLUR). In-vehicle exposure is highly dynamical and is strongly related to the ...

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a prominent model organism in a wide range of biological studies including toxicology. However, toxicological studies are often performed at species specific optimum temperature, and knowledge on the effect of different temperature regimes on the toxicity of metal ions is rather limited. To address this knowledge gap, present study investigates the effect of various thermal scenarios (simultaneous and sequential; acute ...

Although universal and unavoidable, ageing does not occur in a uniform way. Ageing is a complex phenotype responsive to both environmental and genetic factors and includes both chronic and acute processes. Among the plethora of biological phenomena affected by ageing, the malfunction and decrease of biogenesis of mitochondria seem to exert some of the most potent effects on the organism. The aims of this thesis focus on mitochondrial DNA content ...

Complex regional pain syndrome type I (CRPS-I) highly affects patients' ability to perform daily life activities. Pain-related fear might be a key target to reduce disability in chronic pain. Current treatments aiming at reducing pain show little improvements on pain and disability, whereas novel exposure-based treatments targeting pain-related fears have shown to be promising. We conducted a randomized controlled trial (N = 46) comparing ...

For the first time, a mm-wave personal exposure meter (mm-PEM) for the 5th generation of mobile networks (5G) exposure assessment in indoor diffuse fields is presented. The design is based on simulations and on-phantom calibration measurements in a mm-wave reverberation chamber (RC) at 60 GHz. The mm-PEM consists of an array of nine antennas on the body. Using the mm-PEM, the incident power density (IPD) is measured in the unloaded RC, for the ...

In both ambient air pollution epidemiology and health impact assessment an accurate assessment of the population exposure is crucial. Although considerable advances have been made in assessing human exposure outdoors, the assessments often do not consider the impact of individual travel behavior on such exposures. Population-based exposures to NO2 and O-3 using only home addresses were compared with models that integrate all time-activity ...

Populations are exposed to mixtures of pesticides through their diet on a daily basis. The question of which substances should be assessed together remains a major challenge due to the complexity of the mixtures. In addition, the associated risk is difficult to characterise. The EuroMix project (European Test and Risk Assessment Strategies for Mixtures) has developed a strategy for mixture risk assessment. In particular, it has proposed a ...