The European Directive 2013/35/UE establishes the minimum health and safety requirements regarding workers’ exposure to the risks arising from electromagnetic field exposures. The Weighted Peak (WP) index must be used for non-sinusoidal field exposures and WP < 1 guarantees exposure compliance. The need to efficiently evaluate the WP parameter is not satisfied by any commercially available device that could continuously monitor ”exposed” workers.

We modified the firmware of wearable gaussmeters with data storage capability (Talete, by TECNORAD SrL) to simultaneously monitor, for the first time in the literature, five body districts during entire work shifts of a particular class of exposed workers consisting of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) operators working with 1.5 T and 3.0 T scanners.

We also implemented realistic models for human gait and head movements to simulate the operator’s behavior in the stray field of a virtual MRI room. Simulations should help us underline the limitations of the experimental setup used for the monitoring and to individuate induced electric field hotspots in biological tissues.
Finally, we explored another important aspect mentioned by the EU directive: ensuring an appropriate training program for workers. To satisfy this last point, we developed a GUI app that uses a depth camera to capture real movements and project them inside the virtual MRI room, where the WP index is instantaneously visualized.