In this paper we present a new approach for the assessment of noise pollution involving the general public. The goal of this project is to turn GPS-equipped mobile phones into noise sensors that enable citizens to measure their personal exposure to noise in their everyday environment. Thus each user can contribute by sharing their geolocalised measurements and further personal annotation to produce a collective noise map.
Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the EU under contract IST-34721 (TAGora). The TAGora project is funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies program (IST-FET) of the European Commission. Matthias Stevens is a research assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders (Aspirant van het Fonds Wetenschappelijk OnderzoekVlaanderen).
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Abstract:In this paper we present a new approach for the assessment of noise pollution involving the general public. The goal of this project is to turn GPSequipped mobile phones into noise sensors that enable citizens to measure their personal exposure to noise in their everyday environment. Thus each user can contribute by sharing their geo-localised measurements and further personal annotation to produce a collective noise map.
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].
UCL's Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) research group is experimenting with ways to incorporate the most marginalised communities into participatory citizen science activities through which they can share their indigenous knowledge. We work with communities at the extremes of the globalised world-both because of non-literacy and the remote or forbidding environments they inhabit. These groups are the gatekeepers of some key environments on which the future health of the planet depends-from tropical forests to Arctic sea-ice. Here we present the methodologies and tools we are developing to give them a voice.
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