Ricerc@Sapienza

Solar Ultra-Violet (UV) radiation has positive and negative effects on human body tissues. Small doses of solar UV radiation are needed by the human skin for the activation of the vitamin D production. Overexposure to solar UV radiation can produce acute and long-term negative effects, such as sunburns and, in the worst cases, cataracts and skin cancers. For this reason, knowing the amount of UV doses received by people is essential to evaluate their risk to UV overexposure and to evaluate the adequate countermeasure to avoid the negative effects.

The Ultra-Violet Index (UVI) is widespread used to communicate the UV radiation intensity to the general public. The knowledge of the UVI value and of its daily variation is essential for many techniques for monitoring the personal exposure to UV radiation. The UVI values are usually provided by the meteorological services and nowadays it is very common to find UVI forecast tools even in smartphone apps. In this paper, with the aim to evaluate the prediction accuracy of six smartphone apps, a measurement campaign of UVI has been carried out.