NoiseCapture smartphone application as pedagogical support for education and public awareness.

Teaching science subjects such as acoustics to youth or the general public can be facilitated by illustrating physical phenomena or scientific issues using fun experiences. A few years ago, our team developed a smartphone application named NoiseCapture with the aim of offering to anyone the opportunity to measure their sound environment and to share their geolocated measurements with the community in order to build a collective noise map. Since then, NoiseCapture team members have experimented with numerous interventions in schools or scientific events for the general public based on the app to explain not only societal and environmental issues related to noise but also to teach acoustic notions and to address technical and scientific topics associated with sound measurement. This paper describes some of the interventions implemented, in particular, in a school context through training courses given to middle school and university students, as well as teachers of secondary school, that focused on basic knowledge of buildings and environmental acoustics, on the practice of acoustic measurement, and on noise mapping. Some examples of interventions with the general public are also presented that were mostly integrated into scientific events.

A Smartphone-Based Crowd-Sourced Database for Environmental Noise Assessment.

Noise is a major source of pollution with a strong impact on health. Noise assessment is therefore a very important issue to reduce its impact on humans. To overcome the limitations of the classical method of noise assessment (such as simulation tools or noise observatories), alternative approaches have been developed, among which is collaborative noise measurement via a smartphone. Following this approach, the NoiseCapture application was proposed, in an open science framework, providing free access to a considerable amount of information and offering interesting perspectives of spatial and temporal noise analysis for the scientific community. After more than 3 years of operation, the amount of collected data is considerable. Its exploitation for a sound environment analysis, however, requires one to consider the intrinsic limits of each collected information, defined, for example, by the very nature of the data, the measurement protocol, the technical performance of the smartphone, the absence of calibration, the presence of anomalies in the collected data, etc. The purpose of this article is thus to provide enough information, in terms of quality, consistency, and completeness of the data, so that everyone can exploit the database, in full control.

Collaborative noise data collected from smartphones.

Noise stands for an important human health and environmental issue. Indeed, noise causes annoyance and fatigue, interferes with communication and sleep, damages hearing and entails cardiovascular problems (WHO, 2011) [1]. From an environmental point of view, noise implies a lessening of both the richness and abundance of the animal species, an alteration of the communication, which can threaten the reproduction and predation, etc. (Newport et al., 2014; Shannon et al., 2014) [2], [3]. Consequently, effects related to environmental noise result in a huge cost for society, with 2.2 billion euros in France, for example, for the year 2013 (Bourges and Diel, 2015) [4]. In this context, the reduction of noise in the environment is a burning issue, which requires, firstly, carrying out an evaluation of noise in the environment, and secondly, to establish action plans to reduce noise annoyance. With the development of the concept of participatory measurement, and considering the extremely large number of people equipped with a smartphone while being "in mobility", the use of smartphones is potentially a relevant solution to realize a large-scale environmental noise evaluation. The data presented hereinafter are collected from the Android NoiseCapture application and shared from the OnoMap Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The NoiseCapture approach consists in measuring noise along a path, and then to share data with the community. This approach has been developed within the framework of the European ENERGIC-OD project, which aims at deploying a set of Virtual Hubs (VH) to share heterogeneous data with third parties, in respect with the European INSPIRE, and at developing new and original services that can be useful for the community. The noise data that are acquired by volunteers around the world (citizen observations), are organized in three files, containing the path of measures (a set of points), standardized noise indicators, noise description and other useful variables (GPS accuracy, speed…). These data can be very relevant later to propose an environmental noise evaluation, through simple or complex treatments.