Citizen noise pollution monitoring

ABSTRACT

In this paper we present a new approach to monitor noise pollution involving citizens and built upon the notions of participatory sensing and citizen science. We enable citizens to measure their personal exposure to noise in their everyday environment by using GPS-equipped mobile phones as noise sensors. The geo-localised measures and user-generated meta-data can be automatically sent and shared online with the public to contribute to the collective noise mapping of cities. Our prototype, called Noise Tube, can be found online.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bandura, A. 2001. Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, Annual Reviews, 52, 1, 1--26.
• 2: Susan L. Bryant , Andrea Forte , Amy Bruckman, Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia, Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, November 06-09, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/1099203.1099205]
• 3: Burke, J. et al. 2006. Participatory Sensing. ACM Sensys workshop on World-Sensor-Web (WSW'06): Mobile Device Centric Sensor Networks and Applications, ACM Press.
• 4: Andrew T. Campbell , Shane B. Eisenman , Nicholas D. Lane , Emiliano Miluzzo , Ronald A. Peterson , Hong Lu , Xiao Zheng , Mirco Musolesi , Kristóf Fodor , Gahng-Seop Ahn, The Rise of People-Centric Sensing, IEEE Internet Computing, v.12 n.4, p.12-21, July 2008 [doi>10.1109/MIC.2008.90]
• 5: Cardon, D. and Aguiton, C. 2007. The Strength of Weak Cooperation: an Attempt to Understand the Meaning of Web 2.0. Communications&Strategies, 65, 51--65.
• 6: Corbett, J. et al. 2006. Mapping for Change: The emergence of a new practice. Participatory Learning and Action, 54, 1 (April 2006), 13--19.
• 7: Dana Cuff , Mark Hansen , Jerry Kang, Urban sensing: out of the woods, Communications of the ACM, v.51 n.3, p.24-33, March 2008 [doi>10.1145/1325555.1325562]
• 8: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), UK. Noise Mapping England, 2007. Retrieved 2009/01/18. http://noisemapping.defra.gov.uk/cara/wps/portal/noise/maps
• 9: Dubois, D., Guastavino, C. and Raimbault, M. 2006. Acognitive approach to urban soundscapes: Using verbal data to access everyday life auditory categories. Acta Acustica United with Acustica, 92, 6 (Nov./Dec. 2006), 865--874.
• 10: Ellul, C. and Haklay, M. 2008. Creating Community Maps for the London Thames Gateway. In RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2008, London, UK.
• 11: Thomas Erickson , Wendy A. Kellogg, Social translucence: using minimalist visualisations of social activity to support collective interaction, Designing information spaces: the social navigation approach, Springer-Verlag, London, 2003
• 12: European Commission 1996. Green Paper on Future Noise Policy (COM(96) 540).
• 13: European Commission 2002, Directive 2002/49/EC: Assessment and management of environmental noise.
• 14: European Commission Working Group: Assessment of Exposure to Noise (WG-AEN) 2006. Good practice guide for strategic noise mapping and the production of data on noise exposure, Version 2.
• 15: Fogg, B. J. 2007. Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change, Stanford Captology Media.
• 16: Giaccardi, E. et al. 2007. Acoustic Cartographies: Supporting Experiential Learning and Shared Understanding of the Natural Heritage Through Collaborative Mapping. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress on Acoustics (Madrid, Spain, 2--7 Sept. 2007).
• 17: Harper, F. M. et al. 2007. Social Comparisons to Motivate Contributions to an Online Community. Persuasive Technology 2007, de Kort, Y. et al. (Eds.), LNCS 4744, Springer-Verlag, 148--159.
• 18: Hepworth, P. 2006. Accuracy implications of computerized noise predictions for environmental noise mapping. International congress on Noise Control Engineering (Inter-Noise 2006).
• 19: Huberman, B., Romero, D. and Wu, F. 2008. Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity. Working Paper HP Labs.
• 20: Mairie de Paris / BruitParif, France. Paris -- Le carte du bruit routier, 2004. Retrieved 2009/01/18. http://www.v1.paris.fr/fr/environnement/bruit/carto_jour_nuit/cartobruit.html and http://www.bruitparif.fr
• 21: Mapping Change for Sustainable Communities project, London, UK. 2008. Retrieved 2009/01/18. http://www.london21.org/page/79/project/show/mcsc
• 22: Emiliano Miluzzo , Nicholas D. Lane , Andrew T. Campbell , Reza Olfati-Saber, CaliBree: A Self-calibration System for Mobile Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 4th IEEE international conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, June 11-14, 2008, Santorini Island, Greece [doi>10.1007/978-3-540-69170-9_21]
• 23: Musser, J, O'Reilly, T. and the O'Reilly Radar Team 2007. Web 2.0: Principles and Best Practices. O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 2009/03/13. http://radar.oreilly.com/research/web2-report.html
• 24: Bonnie A. Nardi , Diane J. Schiano , Michelle Gumbrecht, Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 06-10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA [doi>10.1145/1031607.1031643]
• 25: Paulos, E. et al. 2007. Sensing Atmosphere. ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2007), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA.
• 26: Paulos, E. et al. 2008. Citizen Science: Enabling Participatory Urbanism. Book Chapter, Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, Marcus Foth (Ed.), Idea Group, 414--436.
• 27: Paxton, M. et al. 2008. Participate: Producing A Mass Scale Environmental Campaign for Pervasive Technology. 6^th International conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2008), Workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability (PPT&ES).
• 28: Raimbault, M. and Dubois, D. 2005. Urban soundscapes: Experiences and knowledge. Cities, 22, 5 (October 2005), 339--350.
• 29: Al M. Rashid , Kimberly Ling , Regina D. Tassone , Paul Resnick , Robert Kraut , John Riedl, Motivating participation by displaying the value of contribution, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1124772.1124915]
• 30: Rogers, E. M. 2003. Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition, Free Press, New York, NY, USA.
• 31: Romer, K. and Mattern, F. 2004. The design space of wireless sensor networks. IEEE Wireless Communications, 11, 6 (December 2004), 54--61.
• 32: Silvia Santini , Benedikt Ostermaier , Andrea Vitaletti, First experiences using wireless sensor networks for noise pollution monitoring, Proceedings of the workshop on Real-world wireless sensor networks, April 01-01, 2008, Glasgow, Scotland [doi>10.1145/1435473.1435490]
• 33: Stapelfeldt, H. 2001. Building noise maps, Public Servant Daily.
• 34: Stapelfeldt, H. and Jellyman, A. 2003.Using GIS in Noise exposure analysis. International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering (Inter-Noise 2003).
• 35: Steels, L. and Tiselli, E. 2008. Social Tagging in Community Memories. Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Social Information Processing, AAAI.
• 36: United Nations Environment Programme 1992. Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 3--14 June 1992).
• 37: Vassileva, J. and Sun, L. 2007. Using Community Visualization to Stimulate Participation in Online Communities. e-Service Journal, 6, 1, Special Issue on Groupware, 3--40.
• 38: Wahlgren, E, (2008). Pocket Protector. Journal of life of sciences, Febr. 13, 2008.
• 39: Yong, E. 2008. City songbirds change their tune. New Scientist, 197, 2649, 33--35.
• 40: Yu, L. and Kang, J. 2008. Effects of social, demographical and behavioral factors on the sound level evaluation in urban open spaces. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123, 2 772--783.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors, Management, Measurement

Keywords:
citizen science, geo-localisation, mobile phones, noise pollution, participatory sensing, sustainability, tagging