On the issues related to compliance of LF pulsed exposures with safety standards and guidelines

In this paper, procedures to determine compliance of low-frequency pulsed exposures are investigated. Current methods specified by international standards or guidelines (e.g., from the ICNIRP or IEEE) are recognized to be conservative in order to account for uncertainties coming from the assessment procedures. In this way, protection of workers and the general public should be guaranteed. However, overly conservative procedures could hinder the application of technologies employing complex, intermittent, or pulsed waveforms without improving safety. Besides over conservatism, variabilities among the results of several procedures are examined for the first time. These limits pose several concerns on the applicability of the existing compliance formulae. A more stable technique, which is still easy to implement, is therefore proposed.