Assessment of exposure to air pollution in children: Determining whether wearing a personal monitor affects physical activity

Personal air pollution monitoring in research studies should not interfere with usual patterns of behavior and bias results. In an urban pediatric cohort study we tested whether wearing an air monitor impacted activity time based on continuous watch-based accelerometry. The majority (71%) reported that activity while wearing the monitor mimicked normal activity. Correspondingly, variation in activity while wearing versus not wearing the monitor did not differ greatly from baseline variation in activity (P = 0.84).