Temperature increase in the fetus exposed to UHF RFID readers.

Abstract

Exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) has prominently increased during the last decades due to the rapid development of new technologies. Among the various devices emitting EMFs, those based on Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies are used in all aspects of everyday life, and expose people unselectively. This scenario could pose a potential risk for some groups of the general population, such as pregnant women, who are expected to be possibly more sensitive to the thermal effects produced by EMF exposure. This is the first paper that addresses the estimation of temperature rise in two pregnant women models exposed to ultrahigh frequency RFID by computational techniques. Results show that the maximum temperature increase of the fetus and of the pregnancy-related tissues is relatively high (even about 0.7 °C), not too far from the known threshold of biological effects. However, this increase is confined to a small volume in the tissues.