# Sleeping-area assessment (full four-quantity survey)

> The combined survey building-biology practice applies to a bedroom: RF power density, AC magnetic field, AC electric field and body voltage, each graded against its own band.

- Canonical URL: https://emfbase.com/protocols/sleeping-area-assessment
- Collection: Measurement protocols
- Record id: `protocols:sleeping-area-assessment`
- Status: verified
- Last verified: 2026-08-12
- JSON: https://emfbase.com/api/protocols/sleeping-area-assessment
- Also known as: bedroom EMF survey, sleeping area survey

## Key values

- **Quantity measured:** power density

## Goal

Produce a single defensible picture of a sleeping area across all four exposure quantities, with mitigation ordered by measured contribution.

## Equipment

- Broadband RF power-density meter
- ELF gaussmeter (power-frequency magnetic field)
- AC electric field meter
- Body-voltage measurement kit
- Logging EMF instrument

## Procedure

1. Run the RF room survey, the ELF magnetic survey and the body-voltage measurement in that order, at the pillow position.
2. Grade each result against the corresponding SBM-2024 band, and separately against the applicable regulatory limit, and report both.
3. Rank the four quantities by how far each sits into its own precautionary band — this ranking, not intuition, determines what to fix first.
4. Apply one mitigation at a time and re-measure only the affected quantity before proceeding.
5. Re-run the full survey after all mitigations and archive both datasets with dates.

## Pitfalls

- Buying shielding before measuring, which is the most common and most expensive mistake
- Fixing the most-discussed source rather than the largest measured one
- Treating SBM precautionary bands as legal limits, or regulatory limits as safety targets — they answer different questions
- Changing several things at once, leaving no way to attribute the improvement

## Interpret results against

- Building Biology SBM-2024 RF band: no anomaly
- Building Biology SBM-2024 AC magnetic field bands
- Building Biology SBM-2024 AC electric field bands
- EUROPAEM 2016 night-time target value for WLAN and similar pulsed sources

## Related records

- [Institut für Baubiologie + Nachhaltigkeit (IBN)](https://emfbase.com/organizations/ibn): The German institute behind the SBM building biology testing methodology and its precautionary evaluation bands, and the training body for building-biology consultants.
- [RF room survey](https://emfbase.com/protocols/rf-room-survey): How to measure radiofrequency exposure in a room so the result is reproducible: peak and average, at body positions, with the dominant direction identified.

## Sources

- `sbm-2024` Institut für Baubiologie + Nachhaltigkeit (IBN) (2024). *Building Biology Evaluation Guidelines for Sleeping Areas (SBM-2024)*. https://buildingbiology.com/site/downloads/SBM-2024_EVALUATION_GUIDELINES_EN.pdf — ngo, link checked 2026-08-12
- `europaem-2016` European Academy for Environmental Medicine (2016). *EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF-related health problems*. https://europaem.eu/en/library/blog-en/97-europaem-emf-guideline-2016 — ngo, link checked 2026-08-12

Data licence: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Dataset version 2026.08.1. Retrieved from EMFBase, https://emfbase.com.

This record is reference data, not medical or legal advice. Regulatory limits, scientific guidelines and precautionary values are labelled separately and answer different questions.