Esophageal pH monitoring developed a dependable external reference electrode. Using this technique to monitor esophageal acid exposure patients for periods up to 24 hours, DeMeester and Johnson were able to identify the most important parameters of esophageal acid exposure, and they developed a composite pH score to quantify gastroesophageal reflux. The initial 24-hour pH studies required hospitalization until the introduction of microcircuits in the 1980s that allowed portable esophageal pH monitoring in an outpatient setting. Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is a common disease in western countries. In the United States, 7% of the population experiences heartburn daily and 44% at least once a
PH from aqueous pH values, because activities relate to different standard states. Hydrogen ion activity, "a", can be defined as: where "μ" is the chemical potential of the hydrogen ion, formula_9 is its chemical potential in the chosen standard state, "R" is the gas constant and "T" is the thermodynamic temperature. Therefore, pH values on the different scales cannot be compared directly due to different solvated proton ions such as lyonium ions, requiring an intersolvent scale which involves the transfer activity coefficient of hydronium/lyonium ion. pH is an example of an acidity function. Other acidity functions can be defined. For example,