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Environmental Monitoring and Assessment

, Volume 186, Issue 10, pp 6193–6206 | Cite as

2Loud?: Community mapping of exposure to traffic noise with mobile phones

  • Simone Leao
  • Kok-Leong Ong
  • Adam Krezel
Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

Despite ample medical evidence of the adverse impacts of traffic noise on health, most policies for traffic noise management are arbitrary or incomplete, resulting in serious social and economic impacts. Surprisingly, there is limited information about citizen’s exposure to traffic noise worldwide. This paper presents the 2Loud? mobile phone application, developed and tested as a methodology to monitor, assess and map the level of exposure to traffic noise of citizens with focus on the night period and indoor locations, since sleep disturbance is one of the major triggers for ill health related to traffic noise. Based on a community participation experiment using the 2Loud? mobile phone application in a region close to freeways in Australia, the results of this research indicates a good level of accuracy for the noise monitoring by mobile phones and also demonstrates significant levels of indoor night exposure to traffic noise in the study area. The proposed methodology, through the data produced and the participatory process involved, can potentially assist in planning and management towards healthier urban environments.

Keywords

2Loud? Traffic noise Mobile phones 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This research was co-funded by the City of Boroondara (Victoria, Australia) and Deakin University. We would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance in research provided by Dr Anita Peerson and the students Leigh Giannopoulos, Luciana Reis Fernandes and Anh Vu Nguyen. Special thanks to all participants who voluntarily engaged in the project. We also would like to thank David Pegg, cartographer at Geomatic Technologies, and the anonymous reviewers for their revision of the text and valuable comments. This project was approved by Deakin University’ Ethics Committee (Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment) on the 10 April 2013 (STEC-6-2013-LEAO).

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Deakin UniversityGeelongAustralia
  2. 2.Deakin UniversityBurwoodAustralia

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