Crowd-sensing our Smart Cities: a Platform for Noise Monitoring and Acoustic Urban Planning

Abstract

Environmental pollution and the corresponding control measurements put in place to tackle it play a significant role in determining the actual quality of life in modern cities. Amongst the several pollutant that have to be faced on a daily basis, urban noise represent one of the most widely known for its already ascertained health-related issues. However, no systematic noise management and control activities are performed in the majority of European cities due to a series of limiting factors (e.g., expensive monitoring equipment, few available technician, scarce awareness of the problem in city managers). The recent advances in the Smart City model, which is being progressively adopted in many cities, nowadays offer multiple possibilities to improve the effectiveness in this area. The Mobile Crowd Sensing paradigm allows collecting data streams from smartphone built-in sensors on large geographical scales at no cost and without involving expert data captors, provided that an adequate IT infrastructure has been implemented to manage properly the gathered measurements. In this paper, we present an improved version of a MCS-based platform, named City Soundscape, which allows exploiting any Android-based device as a portable acoustic monitoring station and that offers city managers an effective and straightforward tool for planning Noise Reduction Interventions (NRIs) within their cities. The platform also now offers a new logical microservices architecture.

Combining Mobile Crowdsensing and Ecological Momentary Assessments in the Healthcare Domain

“…There are a number of applications in the field of healthcare (Guo et al, 2015). Its use cases include data collection in clinical and health/psychological trials (Pryss et al, 2015;Schobel et al, 2015), environmental monitoring and pollution measurement like noise pollution (Schweizer et al, 2011;Zappatore et al, 2017) or air pollution (Mun et al, 2009), public health (Wesolowski et al, 2012), and personal well-being (Consolvo et al, 2006). Although various mobile applications and solutions have been proposed, less works exist that cover reference settings to build generic solutions (Tokosi and Scholtz, 2019).…”

A power-efficient audio acquisition system for smart city applications

“…Smartphones have been considered for noise collection via crowdsourcing. The authors in [18] developed an Android application for the use of acoustic data collection. It gives the user two collection methods, manual mode or automatic collection.…”

Design and Implementation of a Scalable Crowdsensing Platform for Geospatial Data of Tinnitus Patients

“…Users can then access this data and generate real-time noise maps and data graphs. [2], in turn, uses crowdsensing with Android devices for a noise monitoring platform and acoustic urban planning in smart cities. A web-based visualization application is able to suggest certain noise reduction interventions to city planners and helps them to meet European laws and regulations.…”