2Loud?: Community mapping of exposure to traffic noise with mobile phones

Abstract

Despite ample medical evidence of the adverse impacts of traffic noise on health, most policies for traffic noise management are arbitrary or incomplete, resulting in serious social and economic impacts. Surprisingly, there is limited information about citizen's exposure to traffic noise worldwide. This paper presents the 2Loud? mobile phone application, developed and tested as a methodology to monitor, assess and map the level of exposure to traffic noise of citizens with focus on the night period and indoor locations, since sleep disturbance is one of the major triggers for ill health related to traffic noise. Based on a community participation experiment using the 2Loud? mobile phone application in a region close to freeways in Australia, the results of this research indicates a good level of accuracy for the noise monitoring by mobile phones and also demonstrates significant levels of indoor night exposure to traffic noise in the study area. The proposed methodology, through the data produced and the participatory process involved, can potentially assist in planning and management towards healthier urban environments.

Why Do You Need This?

“…These unpaid volunteers often contribute information that they gather with their mobile devices (such as in the case of monitoring noise levels, [19] or else information about themselves, for example when taking part in psychological or health-related citizen science [6]. Some examples of the highly-sensitive data regularly disclosed by citizen scientists are: location (this can relate to personal location at a given point in time, location of work or home, frequency of visiting a particular location), medical data, and information about their work and educational status.…”

Noise mapping based on participative measurements

“…NoiseMap¹⁸ is an application built on similar principles as NoiseTube, but with the main distinguishing feature of allowing users to check the collected data, to made them private and to support real-time representation of user submitted data [63]. Numerous other applications were designed for the purpose of assessing noise levels (Laermometer [64], UbiSound [65], NoiseMeter1 [66], 2Loud?¹⁹ [45,67], etc.). More recently, a team of the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria) designed and deployed the application SoundCity²⁰.…”

Improving Urban Noise Monitoring Opportunities via Mobile Crowd-Sensing

“…Very few research works address urban noise mapping, such as the "Ear-Phone" project [28] where smartphones were used to predict outdoor sound levels, "NoiseSPY" [29], which exploited mobiles carried by bicycle couriers to collect noise data in Cambridge, or the "2Loud?" project [30] that uses iPhones to assess nocturnal noise within buildings near highways in Australia. One of their main limitations, however, is that users are only involved as data collectors but no specific platform functionalities are tailored to city managers for improving urban life quality.…”