A citizen science approach to collect combined noise exposure and survey data

Collecting region-wide noise exposure in combination with survey data is a demanding task, typically entailing large hardware and operational costs.A protocol is developed to relax the costs by relying on a citizen science approach.By implementing a high-quality digital mems microphone on a low-cost hardware platform, an affordable edge device was made operational, allowing high flexibility in sound signal processing and choice of noise indicators to be reported.A user dashboard connects external functionality to gather survey data, measurement location meta-data and shortterm annoyance annotations.Finally, all the data is merged for potential use in policy support.Efficient use of the noise monitors is ensured by a hierarchical distribution in a hublike approach.In this, a citizen acts as a hub administrator and becomes responsible for a limited number of measurement setups.This hub administrator communicates within his local citizen network to distribute and move the equipment across different noise environments.In this publication, the findings from the citizen-based environmental noise monitoring protocol tests are presented.