Participatory noise pollution monitoring using mobile phones

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].