Wilson, AM orcid.org/0000-0003-3259-8169, Verhougstraete, MP orcid.org/0000-0003-4154-7531, Beamer, PI orcid.org/0000-0001-5287-2183 et al. (3 more authors) (2021) Frequency of hand-to-head, -mouth, -eyes, and -nose contacts for adults and children during eating and non-eating macro-activities. Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, 31. pp. 34-44. ISSN 1559-0631
Abstract
Hand-to-face contacts are important for estimating chemical and microbial exposures. Few studies describe children’s hand-to-eye or -nose contacts or adults’ hand-to-face contacts. The study objective was to characterize hand-to-head (mouth, eyes, nose, and other) contacts for children in a daycare and adults in multiple locations. Macro-activities and sequences of hand-to-face contacts were recorded for 263 people observed for 30 min each. Statistically significant differences between locations, males and females, adults and children, and during eating and non-eating macro-activities were evaluated. Discrete Markov chains were fit to observed contact sequences and compared among adults and children during eating and non-eating macro-activities. No significant differences in contact frequency were observed between males and females with the exception of hand-to-nose contacts. Children tended to touch the mouth, eyes, and nose more frequently than adults during non-eating macro-activities. Significant differences in contact frequency were observed between locations. Transitional probabilities indicated that children make repetitive mouth, eye, and nose contacts while adults frequently transition to contacts of the head other than the mouth, eyes, or nose. More data are needed to evaluate the effect of age on adults’ contact frequencies and to confirm lack of statistically significant differences between adults and children during eating macro-activities.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. This article is published with open access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Civil Engineering (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) EP/P023312/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Aug 2020 12:07 |
Last Modified: | 20 Dec 2024 14:20 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Nature |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41370-020-0249-8 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:163542 |