Quantification of children's hand and mouthing activities through a videotaping methodology

A videotaping methodology has been developed for use in quantifying the typ es and Frequencies of children's hand and mouthing activities that could le ad to exposure to environmental pollutants via dermal and ingestion pathway s. Twenty children in day care, ages 3-6 years and 10 children in residence s, ages 2-5 years, were videotaped during their waking hours for 1 day. Par ents of each child completed questionnaires for the purpose of evaluating t he accuracy of parental reports of hand-to-mouth rates. Videotapes were tra nslated as quantifiable activities by two trained observers whose reporting reliability was checked throughout the investigation. Results determined t hat reliability of the videotaping method was very good, even over a year p ost-training. From videotape data, the average hand-to-mouth frequency rate was determined to be 9.5 contacts/h. These values are considerably higher than the current default value of 1.56 contacts/h under consideration by th e EPA.