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To investigate a supposed relationship between exposure by mobile phone base stations and wellbeing, an epidemiological cross sectional study is carried out within the German Mobile Telecommunication Research Program. In a parallel project, a method for the classification of electromagnetic exposure due to mobile phone base stations has been developed. This is based on the results of measurements of high frequency immissions in the interior of more than 1100 rooms and at outdoor locations, the calculation of the emissions of mobile phone antennas under free space propagation conditions and empirically determined transmission factors for the propagation of electromagnetic waves in different types of residential areas for passage of walls and windows. Standard tests (correlation-test, kappa-test, Bland-Altman-Plot, analysis of sensitivity and specificity) show that the method for computational exposure assessment developed in this project is applicable for a first classification of exposures due to mobile phone base stations in epidemiological studies.

A modular hard- and software package for an automated data acquisition and analysis system based on an IBM PC/AT computer has been developed for use in beam scattering experiments. Due to the high flexibility of the soft- and hardware, modifications allowing applications in other experimental set-ups such as spectrometers or optical spectrometers can easily be performed. An interface for communication with low-level peripherals and software modules for menu-driven control, data collection, storage and analysis is described and an example of the use of the system in a collision experiment is presented.