As industry continues to move toward greater automation, an increasing number of work environments have removed the human from the exposure or the exposure from the human. But is our work force becoming healthier as a result of this freedom from occupational exposures? Not at all. A 2011 paper published in the American Journal of Public Health has shown that, despite advances in controlling workplace exposures, chronic diseases continue to affect all working Americans. Why? Because our bodies do not discriminate between exposures encountered at work, in the environment, or during our leisure activities. But imagine the positive impact we could make on health outcomes if we could monitor, evaluate, and control or even eliminate exposures within and outside the workplace through the creation of a total exposure profile. Using advancements in science, technology, and informatics, we have the capability to monitor workplace, environmental, and lifestyle exposures 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and associate those exposures to an individual’s DNA. ORIGIN OF TOTAL EXPOSURE HEALTH After the military’s experience of health consequences relating to Agent Orange exposure during the Vietnam War and the significant adverse health claims by service members deployed to the Persian Gulf War, the need to monitor and document exposures was codified into public law by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998. The Act required the Department of Defense to develop a health surveillance system to detect, document, prevent, or minimize health problems arising from occupational and environmental exposures during deployments and operations. 

The DoD has made advances in health surveillance, but the 24/7 nature of deployments necessitated the development of a more comprehensive view of what exposure meant beyond the typical forty-hour workweek and workplace. Collecting, documenting, and acting upon occupational and environmental health exposures was therefore expanded to include lifestyle choices. This new way of characterizing worker well-being originated at NIOSH through Total Worker Health, which NIOSH defines as “a holistic approach to worker well-being that acknowledges risk factors related to work that contribute to health problems previously considered unrelated to work.” The DoD recognized the validity of this approach but sought greater personalization by utilizing recent advances in the exposure sciences, genomics, sensor and data technologies, and health informatics. This knowledge would contribute to a more complete understanding of an individual’s health risks, root causes of disease and injury, and innovative but accessible methods for primary prevention. The result of the DoD’s efforts is now referred to as Total Exposure Health, or TEH. Operationalizing TEH required partnering across multiple program areas within the military, federal agencies, and academia. TEH uses traditional and emerging exposure assessment technologies, including sensors and “omics-based” molecular biology, and leverages a Big Data infrastructure and advanced analytics. While the near-term goal of TEH is to improve exposure characterization and understand individual variability, susceptibility, and vulnerability to cumulative exposures and risk factors, the immediate objective was to demonstrate the feasibility of TEH and 24/7 collection of exposure data to better understand the effects of total exposure. In the long term, TEH adds genomics and other datasets to translate findings about total exposure into clinically actionable recommendations to improve the health and well-being of both workers and their beneficiaries. Though the ultimate implementation of TEH will monitor a wide range of physical risks such as radiation and chemical exposure from the workplace and environment as well as lifestyle risks from recreational activities and diet, the first focus was on noise exposure.  NOISE EXPOSURE DEMONSTRATION PROJECT The demonstration project focused on noise exposure for several reasons. Noise does not discriminate by age, race, gender, or socioeconomic status. It is costly—for example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spends $1.5 to $2 billion annually in benefits and medical costs related to hearing health, according to a paper in Military Medicine. And noise exposure is widespread—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that noise affects approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population, with 40 million American adults showing signs of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL).  The Noise Exposure Demonstration Project, or NEDP, used sensor technology to collect total noise exposure 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The wearable sensor used for the NEDP collected sound events from both ambient noise in the workplace and environment as well as in-ear sounds from earbuds used with devices playing digital media (such as music). A smartphone app recorded decibel readings.  Nineteen subjects participated in this study at Moody Air Force Base, Ga., over ten days in June 2018. We captured 12,680 total noise events of 70 dBA or above; 2,968 (23 percent) were 95 dBA or above. The average daily (24-hour) dose was about 75 dBA. About 10 percent of the subjects had total daily noise exposures under 70 dB and 10 percent over 80 dB, with the majority in the middle (see Figure 1).

The Individual Exposure Health Risk Profile, or IEHRP, integrates exposure data from both traditional and emerging exposure assessment technologies (including sensors and “omics-based” molecular biology) with clinical and genomics data. Combining the exposure measurement, the genetic proclivity associated with the exposure, and current clinical history associated with the exposure provides a better description of the individual’s risk than would a focus on any one variable. This combination originally resulted in the Individual Exposure Health Risk Index. The IEHRI is defined as

where v_1,1 is the exposure measure, v_1,2 is genetic proclivity to the exposure, and v_1,3 is the clinical effect per the evidence in the individual’s medical record (medical history). For example, when evaluating noise, the IEHRI becomes:

CHALLENGES FOR TEH Several ethical and privacy-related issues must be navigated as TEH develops. The most complex of these issues involve identifiability of workers, the increasingly sensitive nature of genetic information, and the limits of confidentiality (particularly for military populations).  Key for the success of TEH will be the monitoring, collection, identification, and understanding of different types of exposures; the development of biomarkers, technologies, and sensors to measure exposures; and the integration of multiple data streams into a unified framework that can provide useful information to improve healthcare outcomes.  The biggest challenge is development of a common electronic health record, or EHR, which will require solutions to issues such as integration and interoperability, privacy, security, and the use of both structured and unstructured data, especially with the proliferation of sensors and devices. THE NEXT REVOLUTION At the dawn of the industrial revolution, Alice Hamilton pioneered the way we think about exposures in the workplace. Today, with rapid advances in science, technology, medicine, and informatics, we are on the cusp of another revolution. IH/OH professionals and exposure scientists are well positioned to usher in this revolution in much the same way Hamilton did in her time. We will better understand the effects of exposures not only in the workplace and environment, but also in our day-to-day activities. Through initiatives like TEH, we will uncover a new understanding of the relationships between an individual’s genetic predispositions, epigenetic factors, and exposures from lifestyle, occupation, and the environment to support the development of diagnostic approaches, treatment methods, and intervention strategies to truly institute primary prevention that will improve worker health, performance, and productivity.  By embracing bold new ideas, we can transform the current state of disparate exposure monitoring, research studies, data collection, and controls into holistic and integrated systems that quantitate total exposure and inform health outcomes into precise actionable insights and initiatives for individuals or similar exposure groups. The IH/OH profession will leverage genomics, sensor and data technologies, data analytics, and health informatics in a future-focused and progressive approach that represents a disruptive but necessary paradigm shift to the exposure sciences. That shift is Total Exposure Health.   RICHARD HARTMAN, PhD, is an independent consultant for the Air Force Institute of Technology.  MARK OXLEY, PhD, is a full professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, in the Graduate School of Engineering and Management at the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Send feedback to The Synergist.