Kim Anderson has spent decades tracking invisible invaders. As an environmental chemist at Oregon State University, she's seen how the chemicals that surround us — in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the floors we walk on — tell a story much bigger than any single snapshot can capture. Now, her work is getting a significant boost from an unlikely source: silicone wristbands worn by everyday people.
Anderson and toxicologist Alison Clark at Oregon State University have teamed up with researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to advance "exposomics" — the study of every environmental exposure a person encounters from birth to death. The field mirrors genomics in ambition: understanding not just individual factors but how they interact to shape human health.
"The exposome is the totality of exposures you'll encounter in a lifetime, from your prenatal experience to the end of your life," Clark said. "But it's also the route of exposure — whether you've eaten something or inhaled it."
Traditional exposure science has relied on stationary outdoor monitors, which can detect broad pollutants like petroleum combustion products drifting through a city. But these monitors miss the point: people don't live in cities as abstractions. They cook dinner, clean their homes, drive to work, and spend most of their time indoors — places no outdoor sensor can reach.
"The difference between a stationary monitor and the diversity of exposures an individual receives is huge," Anderson said. "You spend a lot of time inside, and you move where the station doesn't."
That's where the wristbands come in. Silicone naturally traps chemicals — phthalates, flame retardants, and other substances — that make contact with the wearer's skin or airways. After a study period, researchers extract and analyze these chemicals in the lab. The approach has already been used to study what harmful substances firefighters encounter on the job and how personal chemical exposure shifts after hurricanes.
"One of the reasons why the wristbands make this research much easier to carry out is that they stay on the participant the entire time," Clark noted. "It goes everywhere you go, pretty unobtrusively."
In their two most recent studies, the team focused on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs — chemicals produced when organic matter like wood or fossil fuels burn. PAHs lurk in car exhaust, stove fumes, charred food, and even ash from wildfires. Some have been linked to cancer, complications in fetal development, and cardiovascular disease.
One paper, published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, analyzed more than 23,000 chemical data points — making it one of the largest investigations of personal variability in chemical exposure using wristbands. The researchers examined factors like season, participant age, home flooring type, and whether subjects operated heavy machinery.
The goal isn't to make people afraid of their own lives, but to give them richer information for navigating the world. Understanding the sources of chemical variability could one day help communities make smarter choices about everything from urban planning to kitchen ventilation. For Anderson, Clark, and their colleagues, the wristband is just the beginning of a much larger conversation about how we live, and how we might live healthier.