Why support the OUTREACH initiative?
What is in it for you? This page gives three key reasons why OUTREACH is necessary, whether you are part of academia or industry.
61%
How many people are not entirely sure that 5G is safe? 61%. Eventhough no conclusive evidence exists that 5G is harmful, this is an awfully high number. As a result, several cities called for deployment stops, the public is protesting and policy-makers echo the general worry by not moving forward to mmWave 5G or even 6G. Moreso than other generations, the higher frequencies and new technologies (e.g. massive MIMO) are particularly concerning for them. For this, good science is crucial to convince the public and policy-makers of our conclusions. But how can we study 5G exposure well without access to real base stations, real environments and real smartphones? This is where you come in. The resulting high-impact research will cite our collaboration under the OUTREACH initiative through acknowledgement/co-authorship.
By supporting the OUTREACH initiative, you show the world your willingness to settle the debate once and for all. There is a need to act, and fast. We hope that a lack of trust will not stand in the way of solving crucial world-scale problems. ​
The academic literature, national governments, the WHO, the EU and even industry are actively calling for more attention to realistic exposure assessment besides the worst-case exposure assessments. By monitoring the EMF levels, robust epidimiology studies can be done which correlate EMF dose with potential adverse health effects, as currently undertaken in the CLUE-H projects. Moreover, we need to know the exposure anywhere in the world, i.e., with high coverage. Only this way can we perform good epi-studies, convince the layman that his street is safe of 5G and compare EMFs statistically in different microenvironments across the world. This is already being done through expensive and tedious measurements worldwide, but it is very difficult to do so using computer simulations. Finally, to study certain phenomena in the EMF exposure literature such as hotspots, an end-to-end simulation tool is required, where every step between the signal at the Tx all the way to the exposure metric on the human are carefully modelled. ​Our research group pushes the SOTA in these realistic exposure assessment tools, as depicted on the right.
Realistic exposure assessment is a crucial direction for modern EMF literature. Data from industry is required to push the SOTA in this field. One base station, one digital twin and one smartphone model does not suffice to model exposure statistically, especially in epidemiological research.
RF-EMF research can be split in three actors: the public, academia, and industry/governments. The public and policy-makers ask the question to academia what the realistic exposure metrics are from 5G and 6G technologies. Academia can not conduct studies using actual devices as they are not easily available. Therefore, worst-case assumptions are taken, such that the exposure is often overestimated and unreliable. When the public asks the same question to industry, the answer takes the form of a large amount of compliance test reports for each of their commercial devices, which fails to present realistic exposure results in end-to-end simulations. Moreover, the public perceives a conflict of interest (CoI) and the exposure assessment is focused on current technologies rather than visionary technologies. One company cannot gain trust from their competitors to assemble all the data in order to perform complete end-to-end simulations. Instead, the question should be asked to non-profit academia, which accesses realistic data from all partners in industry. Using the data under strict data safety conditions, the answer related to realistic end-to-end exposure assessment can be given to the public.
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Huge resources are wasted on reverse-engineering, to eventually settle on worst-case proxies. It is time to change that, and all it requires is trust. Industry also benefits, as they avoid the perceived conflict of interest and enable exposure assessment for 6G.
In summary:
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we need to act, and fast, to convince the public;
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the data would enable a whole field within the realistic EMF exposure literature;
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huge resources are being wasted on both sides just because we do not trust each other.
Not quite convinced?
We understand very well that sharing proprietary data under any circumstance is difficult to agree to. We have no bad intentions, only the intention to truly make a difference. Read more about how we handle your data safely here.
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If you are interested, but unsure, let's just have a chat! You can ask any questions and explore what we can do before committing.