Participatory noise pollution monitoring using mobile phones

Abstract

Noise pollution is a major problem in cities around the world. The current methods to assess it neglect to represent the real exposure experienced by the citizens themselves, and therefore could lead to wrong conclusions and a biased representations. In this paper we present a novel approach to monitor noise pollution involving the general public. Using their mobile phones as noise sensors, we provide a low cost solution for the citizens to measure their personal exposure to noise in their everyday environment and participate in the creation of collective noise maps by sharing their geo-localized and annotated measurements with the community. Our prototype, called NoiseTube, can be found online [1].

Reality–virtuality fusional avatar-based noise measurement and visualization in online virtual geographic environment

“…In general, noise level or loudness is measured as the equivalent continuous sound level or L eq (Maisonneuve et al 2009;Maisonneuve, Stevens, and Ochab 2010;D'Hondt, Stevens, and Jacobs 2012). L eq is commonly adopted in many developed countries.…”

“…A lot of cities in developed countries have made noise maps (Stoter, de Kluijver, and Kurakula 2008;Michel et al 2008;Min 2007). In particular, Paris and Hong Kong have already produced 3D noise maps (Butler 2004;Wing, Kwan, and Kwong 2006), although the traditional noise mapping has some limitations, such as the cost, the uncertainty of results, and so on (Maisonneuve, Stevens, and Ochab 2010;Maisonneuve et al 2009). …”

Participatory noise mapping works! An evaluation of participatory sensing as an alternative to standard techniques for environmental monitoring

“…Indeed, already today there is much demand from citizens, activist groups and even city administrations for using participatory technologies to tackle local pollution issues. 1 Of course this has only been possible because the underlying technologies have been much publicized, in academic literature [6,7] but also in the media. However, it is an open question whether the data gathered with these technologies is at all accurate.…”

“…Second, it is a very actual topic of concern for citizens and authorities, and indeed there are currently important efforts going on to monitor its extent and assess its effects [8,9]. Third, there has been considerable progress in technologies for participatory noise monitoring, with applications such as EarPhone [10], NoiseSPY [11], WideNoise and our in-house NoiseTube application [7,12] taking the lead. Our choice for working with NoiseTube is motivated not only by pragmatic reasons but also because as the only open-source, publicly available project, targeting several platforms and involving not only a mobile application but also a web-based community platform, we feel it is the most complete solution to date [12].…”

Trust management and reputation systems in mobile participatory sensing applications: A survey

“…Participatory sensing systems can be applied to serve many of our daily life needs, including health monitoring (e.g., [4,5,6,7,8]), traffic monitoring (e.g., [9,10,11,12] ), noise monitoring (e.g., [6,13,14]), weather monitoring (e.g., [15,6]),…”