Public Exposure to Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Fields
By Peter Gajšek. Chapter 3: pp. 47-64. Abstract
The increasing use of various wireless devices and development of new telecommunication technologies has resulted in a fundamental change of radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) exposure in the everyday environment. In the last three decades, a large number of scientific studies on the exposure assessment of the general public to RF-EMF in different environments were completed. The results of numerous exposure assessment studies come to almost the same conclusions: that public RF-EMF exposures in different micro environments are only a small fraction of existing RF exposure standards.

In general, all the research studies related to exposure assessment of the general public to fixed RF-EMF sources in the environment including base stations, broadcasting, and wireless systems clearly demonstrated that the total mean value of the electric field was quite low and did not exceed 10% of the internationally recognized limit values.
It is expected that the strength and complexity of EMF exposures will increase continuously, especially in relation to expansion of the 5th generation of mobile telephony and other emerging technologies that will use different frequency bands. An increasing number of devices and processes employing these frequencies (household appliances, telecommunication, etc.) have already been introduced into everyday life. Almost nothing is known about these exposures and potential exposure levels.

It is expected that global mobile data traffic will grow at a compound annual rate of 45% in the coming years, which represents a tenfold increase between 2016 and 2022 (Ericsson, 2016). This increase is driven largely by the adoption of mobile video streaming. On top of that, the Internet of Things (IoT) is shifting from a vision to reality. The 29 billion connected devices by 2022 are expected to include 18 billion IoT or machine-to-machine (M2M) devices. Subsequently, the future 5G mobile networks will need to support new challenging and new use cases, which will demand more spectrum in ever higher frequency ranges.
Furthermore, emissions will continue to change in characteristics and levels due to new infrastructure deployments, smart environments, and novel wireless devices. Thus it is expected that the complexity of EMF exposures will increase in the future.