NoiseTube App Turns Your Smartphone into Noise Pollution Sensor

NoiseTube, a free Java application for GPS- enabled cell phones, turns your cell phone into a noise sensor and lets you measure your exposure to noise pollution in your environment. Sounds are picked up by your phone’s built-in mic and used in collective noise mapping through tagging it with your perceived annoyance level , sending geolocalized data automatically to the NoiseTube server over internet. The server then tags your noise sample is with the street name and the city name it was recorded at and converts it into a Google Earth compatible format.

The effects of noise pollution include hearing loss, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, heightened stress, sleep disturbance, and decreased school performance. A study in the European Heart Journal found that if you live or work with noise over 60 decibels, you are more likely to suffer a heart attack than people in a quieter environment. That is why, in order to establish the most noise polluted areas, the EU has mandated that member states produce noise maps of urban areas regularly, according to European Directive 2002/49/EC relating to the assessment and management of environmental noise, also known as the Environmental Noise Directive (END).

Nicolas Maisonneuve at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, thinks the current mapping is not accurate, due to data collection techniques, and has developed NoiseTube as an additional channel for gathering information. The software currently works accurately on the Sony Ericsson W995, Nokia N96, Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N85, Nokia E65 and Nokia 5800 only, since the Sony team needs to calibrate the software for microphone levels on each phone model individually.

So far the effort is voluntary, using individual citizens, but I think that if local municipal agencies could get involved, they would be able to push the app out to a far wider penetration. For example, if postal carriers were given the option to purchase subsidised cell phones on the condition they allow the Noisetube app to be installed and carry it with them on their rounds, that really get things going.

If you are in Europe, have one of the Nokias in the above list, and want to get involved, you can download the app and get started now.