EMF Health Impacts: More Research Needed

I’ve long been an enthusiastic supporter of using information and communication technology to support healthcare, education and political and economic empowerment. My interest dates back to 1982, when I wrote a graduate school paper entitled The Human Development Network. At that time, cable TV and desktop PCs were the new technologies of the day, the first brick-sized portable cellphones had yet to hit the market, and the closest thing to smartphones and “wearables” were found in the fictional worlds of Star Trek and Dick Tracy. Given my longstanding interest in beneficial uses of technology, it’s exciting to see today’s explosion of innovation related to wireless connectivity, and to consider future possibilities, including graphene-based wearables (see here and here).

That being said, I’m concerned that, in our rush to exploit the power of today’s wireless technologies, we are ignoring an uncomfortable issue raised by its rapidly expanding usage: the fact that we don’t understand very well the health impacts of surrounding ourselves (particularly our children, elderly, infirm and other vulnerable populations) with ever-increasing amounts of electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation, using an ever-expanding array of devices, frequency bands, duty cycles, modulation schemes, etc. (it’s worth noting here that some forms of EMF have been shown to have health benefits).

Though I’m not an electrical engineer, biologist or healthcare expert, I’m convinced that I’ve read enough about this issue to conclude one thing with confidence: that we, as a society, would be wise to invest more time, money and expertise in studying the real-world biological and health impacts of the expanding array of digital technologies we use today—and that we’d be foolish not to.

I’ve also come to believe that, while such research may be challenging, it should be a top priority as we continue to increase our usage of and exposure to EMF-producing devices. And while it may be comforting (psychologically and financially) to cite the limited research currently available (perhaps with a bit of cherrypicking) as a basis for dismissing health concerns as we race eagerly forward into the next wave of wireless connectivity, I’m convinced that such a conclusion is premature and overly simplistic…and perhaps even dangerous, especially for our most vulnerable citizens.

Replacing baby rattles with smartphones

A recent MarketWatch article highlights some of the potential risks and lack of research necessary to adequately understand and address them:

Executives dream of winning young customers over to their products. Companies like Apple…and Samsung…appear to be succeeding when the customers are barely out of their cribs.

More than half of babies in low-income households are tapping on smartphones or tablets by the age of two, with some spending more than an hour at a time using them. And more than one-third of low-income children have used them by the time they turn 1. That’s according to a study presented last month at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in San Diego by Hilda Kabili, a third-year resident doctor at the Einstein Health Network in Philadelphia. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages the use of computers, smartphones and tablets by children under age 2, but there’s little long-term research on the effects of using them at such a young age.

I have to admit I find these statistics troubling in light of the last sentence about a lack of long-term research, coupled with research suggesting children absorb more EMF radiation than adults (for a short synopsis of this study, see this Forbes article).

More light, less heat needed in EMF health impact debate

I’m all for leveraging the power of wirelessly-networked digital technology. But if this technology is going be an ever growing part of our life (which seems extremely likely), I think we owe it to ourselves, our children and future generations to invest a small percentage of the many billions of dollars we spend on it to understand if and how it is impacting our health, and how we can best reduce any negative impacts. This seems especially important when it comes to the health of children, the elderly and other vulnerable populations.

I’m not going to argue here that EMF health risks are large, small or anywhere in between. In fact, I’m tired of hearing blanket assertions that various wireless technologies are either “safe” or “harmful.” [If you’d like to explore the debate and the research surrounding it, you might begin here and here (“harmful”) and here (“safe”)].

Simplistic assertions of safety or lack thereof may be emotionally and/or financially satisfying for those heavily invested in either side of the debate, which has been marked by dismissiveness and dissembling on one side, and sometimes blinding anger and distrust on the other. But in such an environment, scientific and public policy questions that are already challenging become very difficult even to discuss, let alone to address with well-designed, unbiased research.

Yet it is exactly that kind of research that’s needed to clarify how we can continue to expand the benefits of wireless technology while mitigating harmful impacts associated with its ever-increasing use. And this research should be well-funded and ongoing, as no doubt will be our continuing investments and innovations in wireless networks and devices. And it should be well protected from money-driven (or any other) bias. In my view, science influenced by corporate profit-seeking simply cannot be trusted as science (big pharma’s growing control and distortion of medical research, discussed here and here, is a troubling example of this dynamic).

$1B/yr. of research for the price of a small latte

In terms of funding, consider the following very rough calculation as an indicator of what might be possible if, as a society, we decided to take this issue seriously:

According to CTIA, there were 335.65 million wireless subscriber connections in the U.S. at the end of 2013. And, according to the Statista web site, the average monthly revenue per cellular user (ARPU) ranged from the low 40s to the high 50s, depending on the carrier. If we use the CTIA subscriber count and assume a monthly ARPU of $50, a 0.5% tax on cellular revenue would generate roughly $1 billion per year, with the per-customer cost being $3.00 per year or $0.25 per month. This amount could be further supplemented by a comparably small tax on carrier profits and/or on the sale of sale of EMF-emitting devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, cordless phones, etc. And to the extent a similar tax was established in other countries, the total amount available for a global research effort on EMF health impacts would increase accordingly.

Using the power of tech to study its health impacts

To maximize its effectiveness and relevance, I’d suggest integrating a program of EMF health-impact research into the kind of “Learning Health Systems” now being developed (including a project underway at U of M). In my view, the LHS model holds great promise as a way to use digital technology to dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our deeply dysfunctional healthcare system.

As explained on the Learning Health Community web site:

The LHS aims to harness the power of ever increasing amounts of health data captured in digital forms in order to engender ongoing cycles of knowledge generation and curation, tailored feedback, and transformative change. It is grounded in the recognition that two of the least well utilized resources in health care are patients ourselves (everyone will be a patient and/or caregiver) and lessons learnable from our collective health experiences. Such shared data that digitally captures these experiences (in many cases, simply as a byproduct of care delivery) forms the lifeblood of the LHS when it is aggregated, analyzed, and converted to actionable knowledge. This knowledge is then shared with stakeholders who can benefit and learn from it – and ultimately use it to improve health, save lives, revolutionize biomedical research, protect the public’s health, and transform our patient experience…

Just as the Internet had transformative impacts on numerous and diverse stakeholders’ ways of working, communicating, and interacting, the LHS promises to have broad and far-reaching impacts on health. The LHS is one infrastructure, serving multiple purposes, being built collaboratively atop a foundation of meaningful use and other health IT investments. In doing so, the LHS holds the potential to transform care delivery by shortening the on-average 17-year gap between knowledge generation and its application, to empower clinicians and patients with knowledge to inform their decisions, and to create a more robust public health and biomedical research infrastructure for the nation.

There’s more I could say about EMF health issues and Learning Health Systems, and how they may be related, but I’ll save that for future blog posts. For now, let me summarize the basic message of this post:

As we apply our creativity and financial resources to exploring and exploiting the many benefits of wireless technology, let’s also take responsibility for learning more about how these technologies interact with our bodies. And let’s also learn how we can best mitigate negative health impacts as we continue adding to the invisible but very real EMF cloud we’re all now living in. In my view, this is an effort well worth making, and certainly worth skipping one trip to Starbucks per year to help pay for it.

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: EMFs health impacts Learning Health Systems research Wireless

EMF Health Impacts: More Research Needed