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Turn your mobile phone into an environmental sensor and participate to the monitoring of noise pollution
Noise pollution is a serious problem in many cities. NoiseTube is a research project, started in 2008 at the Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris and currently hosted by the BrusSense Team at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, which proposes a participative approach for monitoring noise pollution by involving the general public. Our ambitious goal is to extend the current usage of mobile phones by turning them into noise sensors enabling citizens to measure their own exposure in their everyday environment. Furthermore each user can also participate in creating a collective map of noise pollution by sharing geolocalized measurement data with the NoiseTube community.
By installing the free app on your smartphone, you will be able to measure the level of noise in dB(A) (with a precision a bit lower than a sound level meter), and contribute to collective noise mapping effort by annotating it (tagging, e.g. subjective level of annoyance). This information can be automatically published on this website (3G/GPRS or manual upload on any PC).
Motivations to participate
Citizens and Communities concerned with noise- Measure your daily sound exposure in dB(A) with your mobile phone
- Tag noisy sources to inform the community about them
- Visualize your measures on a map and contribute to the creation of a collective map of noise
- Compare your experience to that of others
- Privacy: all measurements are yours.You decide to make them public or not
- Improve decision-making by understanding local and global noise pollution in your city using maps and statistics
- Get direct feedback and opinions from cititzens
- Get access to and analyze (anonymized) data
- Find out what is important in soundscape perception
- Use our environmental sensor web API to do your own web mashups
How to participate
If you have an Android-based or Java ME-capable smartphone with GPS (iPhone version is under submission to the App Store), download the free app to participate!Open source
NoiseTube is built in the spirit of open participation and the software that has been developed as part of the project has been placed under the GNU LGPL v2.1 open source license. The source code has been published on Google Code. We welcome anyone who wants to to contribute to the project (as a developer or otherwise) to contact us.
The sound exposure of a user during a walk in Paris. Circles represent sound levels in dB(A) as measured by the user.
The mobile application has 3 features:
- measure noise,
- localize it,
- tag it.Data is sent to the NoiseTube server through internet in real-time.
Map of noise pollution visualisable on Google Earth.
A real-time visualisation of the collective pollution exposure in Google Earth.
The noise exposure of 2 lines of the RATP subway, Paris.
2008-2011 - Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris & VUB BrusSense group
Source code available under GNU LGPL v2.1 license and hosted on Google Code.
