Living and Working in a Healthy Environment: How Sensor Research in Flanders can Help Measure and Monitor Exposure to Certain Environmental Factors

People's daily living environment has an important influence on their physical and mental health. That living environment consists of many different components, as it is both a spatial or physical environment, and the result of many other processes (socio-cultural, economic context and individual characteristics and lifestyles). Overall, the pressure on the physical environment is very high, especially in densely populated and highly urbanised area’s such as Flanders, the northern part of Belgium. In urban environments, for instance, many spatial demands come together (space for housing, economy, mobility, green and blue infrastructures, etc.). The spatial layout of our cities can influence our health (e.g. whether or not we live nearby green spaces or in an environment that promotes active mobility, social contacts, if there are sources that impact the air quality, etc.), and of course our behaviour. The relation between health, living and working environment and spatial planning is complex. Therefore, the Flemish Department of Environment & Spatial Development has prepared a framework in 2019 to better capture that complex relationship, which we will briefly discuss in this paper. Broadly speaking, a policy committed to healthy environments may choose to make interventions that protect people's health from certain external factors (e.g. air pollution or environmental noise) or that enable and promote healthy lifestyles (e.g. physical activity, food,…). Next to that, providing citizens with up to date information is an important task of the government. In this paper, we discuss the research that the Environment and Health research team at the Flemish Department of Environment & Spatial Development conducts in order to measure human exposure to certain factors via sensors. Those particular factors were chosen mainly because they are part of themes around which the Flemish Department can make policy. We will consider three ongoing cases: measuring the quality of the indoor environment in different types of semi-public locations (such as schools, residential care centres, cultural centres,…), measuring radiofrequency radiation from fixed transmitting antennas in urban environments and measuring noise pollution. Partnering with international research & development organizations such as IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre) and VITO (Flemish Institute for Technological Research), they supplied us with innovative and high-quality sensor technology. The sensors can transmit their measurement data in real time and participating parties can track the data on dashboards allowing immediate feedback and action when necessary. The results are intended to feed further research. Although not all case studies are equally advanced, we will conclude each one with possible policy actions

Fotoakoestische studie van niet-radiatieve vervalprocessen van elektronisch aangeslagen toestanden

KULeuven Campusbibliotheek Exacte Wetenschappen / UCL - Université Catholique de LouvainSIGLEBEBelgiu

Vivre ou survivre? Un état des lieux de notre planète

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Region-wide environmental noise monitoring in Flanders through Citizen Science : protocol to integrate surveys and measurements

Within the Program for Innovation Procurement, the Flemish government is investing in innovative methods to answer numerous societal challenges. With support of this program the Department of Environment will develop a region-wide noise monitoring protocol in a two year project, started in April 2023. To achieve this, Ghent University partnered up with Scivil, the knowledge center for Citizen Science in Flanders. The noise monitoring question fits in an environmental noise indicator evaluation designed by the Ghent University in 2019-2020. This manuscript gives an overview of the project outline. We discuss the goals, the methodology, the technical implementation and the dataflow. We explain the strategy to include citizens to achieve both the societal and the scientific goals. Since this is a government funded project, the societal aspects have priority. The first component is the technology: hardware, quality, calibration, noise surveys, event classification, privacy and data storage. The second component is the citizen engagement: how to achieve the data collection at a reasonable cost? The third component is the sampling strategy: how to reach an unbiased dataset for multiple variables: spatial characteristics, sources and population? The last component deals with applications: trends in population exposure and perception. This protocol will provide matched exposure and perception data at an unprecedented scale

Numerical analysis of a slit-groove diffraction problem

http://www.jeos.org/index.php/jeos_rp/article/view/07022We present a comparison among several fully-vectorial methods applied to a basic scattering problem governed by the physics of the electromagnetic interaction between subwavelength apertures in a metal film. The modelled structure represents a slit-groove scattering problem in a silver film deposited on a glass substrate. The benchmarked methods, all of which use in-house developed software, include a broad range of fully-vectorial approaches from finite-element methods, volume-integral methods, and finite-difference time domain methods, to various types of modal methods based on different expansion techniques

Complementary peptides represent a credible alternative to agrochemicals by activating translation of targeted proteins

Feeding an increasing world population in the context of climate change is one of the grand challenges faced by our generation. Here, the authors show that external application of synthetic complementary peptides can increase the abundance of target proteins to modulate plant growth or stress resistance