Nowadays, electricity and electromagnetic (EM) waves play a very important role in our daily lives in the applications of household appliances, broadcasting, personal communications, and so on. However, the widely established electrical facilities and telecommunication base stations have resulted in increased concerns about the effects of EM radiation on the health of the public and has caused conflict between residents and the power company or telecom carriers. In order to reduce the ever increasing concern among the residents around these facilities, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is planning to establish a long-term environmental non-ionizing radiation monitoring system and will allow to the public to access the environmental EM radiation information via the EPA website. The objective of this project is to draft a proposal for the establishment of the long-term environmental non-ionizing radiation monitoring system in EPA. We collected and analyzed international technical documents and the latest research results from advanced countries regarding long-term EM radiation monitoring techniques. Based on this information, we drafted the measurement method for the long-term EM radiation monitoring in outdoor environment as well as in indoor environment such as in homes or school building. In order to verify the applicability of the drafted method, we performed EM wave monitoring in five major cities in Taiwan. The seven-day long-term measurements of radio frequency (RF) radiations were performed at 6 outdoor locations in Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung. The long-term monitoring of extremely low frequency (ELF) magnetic field was performed at 6 indoor locations in Hsinchu that involved continuous monitoring of the environmental magnetic field for 7 days in a house or 12 hours in a school. The measurement result is in agreement with most of the results published by the research documents we collected. These measurements show the applicability of the drafted method for RF radiation monitoring as well as for ELF magnetic field monitoring in both outdoor and indoor environments.

Non-Ionizing Radiation, Electromagnetic Field, Radio Frequency, Extremely Low Frequency