Functionality Report: MCRA and low-end user apps

Food may contain hazardous substances such as contaminants or residues from pesticides or food packaging materials. Food risk assessment requires different types of data e.g., chemical concentration, food consumption and health hazard data. Well-established datasets exist such as organized by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and Member States data collection framework composed of national residue data and food consumption data collections, but so do emerging datasets, including data from total diet studies (TDS). TDS data can be very useful for food risk assessment because hazardous chemicals are measured in food as consumed. Data harmonization and data conversion are therefore essential steps in the assessment process. In addition, food risk assessment is complex and is constantly evolving, adopting different statistical approaches and ICT environments (e.g. cloud computing) as the discipline develops. Therefore, it is useful to develop demonstrator software to facilitate understanding and guide different user groups including risk assessors and low-end-users how to use e-services and the relevant data sets in international risk assessment or for training purposes.

The FNS-Cloud project created e-services that enable two types of user communities; low-end users (such as consumers or potential professional users that are not experts for TDS concept or exposure assessment) and researchers/risk assessors (experts and high-end users), to evaluate and visualize chemical food safety data after applying international risk assessment. Using the tools and services developed low-end users will be able to use concentration data from total diet studies (TDS) within the decision-making processes in their daily life, e.g., food purchasing and food choice. High-end users will be able to use TDS or monitoring data for higher-tier and more complex risk assessments analyses. Specifically, the latter approach will use the probabilistic assessment with the Monte Carlo Risk Assessment (MCRA) tool.

With the tools and services developed within FNS-Cloud there are five phases to this work split over WP 4 (Use cases) and WP 5 (Demonstrators), covering specification, implementation and testing (Task 4.3) and improvement and evaluation (in WP 5). For each use case, demonstrator software has been developed. In Part I of this report the functionalities of the MCRA TDS demonstrators and the MCRA Mixture Risk Assessment demonstrator are described – the high-end user tool. The demonstrators were tested by representatives of three groups namely 1) Academia, 2) public health institutes performing TDS (TDS centres) and 3) industry. Each group was initially trained to use the tools and e-services and after training the functionalities of the tools were discussed, and representatives of these groups also outlined their future user needs. Overall, they perceived the functionalities very positively, they understood the data formats and how their own private data could be used in the MCRA-software. Those in academia were able to familiarize themselves with new concepts in risk assessment using TDS data sets from three European Member States.

Finally the TDS network centres emphasized their needs to work in a harmonised approach. The first TDS demonstrator enabled them to organize their TDS data in internationally agreed formats such as the Standard Sample Description (SSD) format used by EFSA and the European Member States. Part II of this report describes the low-end user mobile app called FoodMagnifier. The aim of this app is to inform the general public about the content data of contaminants and residues in foods, based on the findings of Total Diet Studies. The app presents this information to the user in visual formats using graphs and charts, comparing the amount of substance in different types of foods. In addition to the content information, background information is also included, such as a description of the chemical, exposure statistics, health-based and toxicological reference values, and the role that different food categories play in dietary exposure. This deliverable also describes two usability tests that were performed with a wide variety of users, the results of those tests, as well as the improvements of the app based on those and the future plans.