PERK, an acronym for Predicting Environmental concentration and RisK, is an R/Shiny application tool. It is designed to facilitate automated modelling and reporting of predicted environmental concentrations of a comprehensive set of pharmaceuticals derived from a wide range of therapeutic classes with different modes of action.
The tool allows users to input their measured concentration, and compare the predicted (PEC) and measured concentrations (MEC) of the pharmaceuticals by means of the PEC/MEC ratio. This helps to establish whether the predicted equations used tend to underestimate or overestimate measured values.
PERK provides a consistent interactive user interface in a familiar dashboard layout, enabling users to visualize predicted values and compare them with their measured values without any hassles¹². Users can download data and graphs generated using the tool in .csv format or as publication-ready images.
The tool uses prescription data from PrAna, an R package to calculate and visualize England NHS prescribing data. It also uses data from WWTP collaborators, API properties, recovery percentage, physio-chemical properties, and eco-toxicity data collected from research articles and data repositories.
PERK is easy to install and use. With just a few commands, users can install it and begin using it. For an introduction to the package, step-by-step instructions on getting started, and more information on the different ways you can use the package, users can refer to the PERK-Walkthrough tutorial.
This work is a part of the Wastewater Fingerprinting for Public Health Assessment (ENTRUST) project funded by Wessex Water and EPSRC IAA (grant no. EP/R51164X/1). If the package helps you with your work in any way that justifies it, please cite the article published in Science of The Total Environment(Jagadeesan, Barden, and Kasprzyk-Hordern 2023).
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