Exposure assessment and dosimetry for epidemiology on the mobile phone use

This paper reviews the researches on the exposure assessment for Japanese national part of the INTERPHONE study and also the recent progress in the exposure assessment for epidemiological studies. We discuss the changes in the exposure conditions due to the changes in the mobile communication systems and in the mobile phone use in consideration of ongoing and future studies of epidemiology for health risk assessment of mobile phones. The difficulties include low output power of 3^rd generation phones during the ordinary use, invisible antenna location from the external view of the device, and uncertainty of the laterality of use in spite of the significance to determine the level of exposure at the location of the tumour. Recently developed software modified phone is expected to be a powerful tools to overcome a part of those difficulties.