Introducing Eyewear Lenses as Passive Samplers for Assessing Inhalation Exposure to Airborne Chemicals

Wearable passive samplers are inexpensive tools for assessing personal exposure to diverse contaminants through a combination of exposure pathways. This versatility, however, can be a disadvantage when it is critical to assess a specific pathway. Here, we aim to develop eyewear lenses as passive samplers that can capture inhalation exposure as a primary pathway for airborne contaminants. We designed polycarbonate lens samplers with and without a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) coating and compared their surface properties and chemical uptake. We compared the chemical profiles they sampled from indoor lab and office environments using solvent-soaked wipes to extract the chemicals by wiping the lens surfaces and analyzing the wipe extracts using non-targeted screening on LC-QTOF-MS. Compared to the comparably transparent uncoated lenses, the PDMS-coated lenses were up to six times rougher in morphology. This difference, unexpectedly, did not yield significant differences in the chemical profiles measured between the PDMS-coated and uncoated polycarbonate lenses. Combined, both lens types sampled over 900 features, with diverse physico-chemical properties, annotated at varying levels of confidence. Level 2 features include phthalates and organophosphate esters commonly used as plasticizers. These promising results form the foundation for further developing the lenses as passive sampling eyewear for easily assessing inhalation exposure at the population level.