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The Residential Population Generator (RPGen): A tool for creating internally consistent populations and households.
Citation:
East, A., P. Price, K. Dionisio, K. Isaacs, Jeff Hollister, D. Dawson, E. Hubal, R. Tornero-Velez, K. Phillips, G. Glen, H. Hubbard, J. Levasseur, J. Luh, AND A. Fisher. The Residential Population Generator (RPGen): A tool for creating internally consistent populations and households. 2021 ISES Annual Meeting (Virtual), Durham, North Carolina, August 30 - September 02, 2021. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.15157605
Impact/Purpose:
Limited data are available to assess potential chemical risks to humans from manufacture, use, and disposal of consumer products and articles. Tools are needed to access and leverage available data on chemical manufacture, use, and occurrence for important chemical exposure scenarios and pathways across the product lifecycle. Scientific workflows are designed to execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps. The simplest automated scientific workflows are scripts that call in data, models, and other inputs and produce outputs that may include analytical results and visualizations. The value of using this approach is that domain-specific data types and tools can be made available to the exposure scientist and easily accessible to the exposure assessor for specific decision contexts. This product provides regulatory scientists, students and researchers with the ability to effectively access and exploit the many in silico data streams to support different regulatory purposes and supports current Agency efforts to reduce mammal study requests by 30% by 2025, and completely eliminate all mammal study requests and funding by 2035.
Description:
Chemical exposure is frequently characterized using models bound by time, location, and activity. These models require inputs that describe communities, homes, and individuals. Therefore, models with granular descriptions of populations are better equipped to estimate exposure and dose. The Residential Population Generator (RPGen) assembles a synthetic population from three United States (U.S.) surveys and the R Package httk for use in models of intraindividual probabilistic exposure and dose. The final modeled population data parameters include characteristics of the individual’s community (region, state, urban or rural), residence (size of property, size of home, number of rooms), demographics (age, ethnicity, income, gender), and physiology (body weight, skin surface area, breathing rate, cardiac output, blood volume, and volumes for body compartments and organs). To demonstrate RPGen, a run of the Consolidated Human Exposure Model (CHEM), of which RPGen is the first module, is compared to output from the Stochastic Human Exposure Dose Simulation - High-Throughput (SHEDS-HT), a cross sectional model for 1-day exposure predictions across a population. Both estimates are validated across the CompTox dashboard daily exposure predictions, which are estimated using the Systematic Empirical Evaluation of Models (SEEM), an integration and evaluation framework which calibrates model estimates against NHANES biomonitoring data. For both SHEDS-HT and CHEM five product use categories pertaining to 253 chemicals relating to swimming pool maintenance and cleaning are evaluated. The results demonstrate that the RPGen population, when integrated in a model, provides determinants for exposure which inform product use. In addition, by creating profiles and characteristics that determine exposure, RPGen allows modelers to simulate data-driven populations and identify those potentially vulnerable to chemical exposures.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: The Residential Population Generator (RPGen): A tool for creating internally consistent populations and households.
ORD-042000_SLIDES ISES.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 895.458 KB, about PDF)