Towards a Planetary Health Impact Assessment Framework: Exploring expert knowledge and artificial intelligence for a RF-EMF exposure case-study

Abstract

While recent WHO systematic reviews have comprehensively assessed the direct health effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) exposure, its potential indirect impacts on human health via ecosystem disruption remain unstudied. Therefore, we propose a Planetary Health Impact Assessment (PHIA) approach, which incorporates both direct and ecologically mediated pathways. Developing the underlying framework requires a method for organizing and visualizing complex, interdisciplinary knowledge. This study explores an approach for constructing a PHIA framework in the form of knowledge graphs (KGs). Using RF-EMF exposure from mobile telecommunication technologies as a case study, we developed an expert-based KG in collaboration with 12 specialists. We further evaluated the potential of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool, incorporating Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning, to extract relevant information from scientific literature and generate KGs to explore ways to enhance the expert-based approach. Experts developed and visualized jointly the hypothesized pathways linking RF-EMF exposure to direct health effects on organisms and indirect effects on human health through ecological consequences. The AI tool quickly processed large volumes of literature and visualized it into KGs with varied structures but required extensive expert validation due to limitations in precision and context sensitivity. The expert-based KG can serve as organizer of the available knowledge and as a first step in PHIA development. While AI tools offer potential for exploratory analysis, they currently require substantial human oversight and cannot replace expert judgment. The resulting KGs also identified possible gaps in the scientific literature.