노인 인구집단의 시간활동양상에 따른 노출계수 최신화 = Update of Exposure Factors Based on the Time-Activity Patterns of an Elderly Population

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Background: As population aging intensifies in South Korea, the social roles and behavioral patterns of older adults have become increasingly diverse. Since time-activity patterns change over time, existing exposure factor data may not adequately reflect recent lifestyle patterns, which could reduce the accuracy of exposure and risk assessments based on them. In addition, domestic exposure factors only classify individuals aged 65 and older into three age groups, resulting in a lack of detailed exposure factors that account for individual differences within the elderly population.
Objectives: This study utilized Time-Use Survey data to estimate the duration of stay in various microenvironments and the time spent on specific activities. The elderly group, which had previously been assessed using a only a limited number of age categories, was further subdivided to derive exposure factors for time-activity patterns corresponding to each age group.
Methods: This study analyzed 13,326 time diaries from individuals aged 65 and older within the 2024 Korean Time-Use Survey. Since the Time-Use Survey did not include information on whether each microenvironment was indoor or outdoor, an additional questionnaire was conducted to estimate indoor-outdoor ratios. The indoor-outdoor ratios for each microenvironment obtained from the questionnaire survey were applied to the Time-Use Survey data to estimate residence time and time spent on each activity.
Results: As age increased, time spent in residential indoor increased, while time spent at workplaces, other indoors, outdoor, and in transport (vehicle) declined across all groups. Sleep, leisure activities using media, eating and snack intake, and personal hygiene and appearance care were consistently identified as the most time-consuming activities across all groups, regardless of weekdays or weekends and sex.
Conclusions: The time-activity pattern based exposure factors proposed in this study supplement the limitations of existing exposure factor data and are expected to serve as foundational data for more accurately reflecting the characteristics of older adults.