The Design of an Environmental-Noise-Labeling App for Citizen Participation in Smart Cities †

The urban acoustic environment is composed of a great variety of sounds, whose effects citizens are mainly unaware of, despite medical studies showing that urban noise affects quality of life and health, causing various problems from sleep disturbances to cardiovascular diseases. The development and deployment of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) presents new ways to meet urban acoustic challenges in the context of a smart city environment. The improvement of the quality of life of the citizens cannot be limited to measuring the equivalent levels of noise in the streets but should also identify the type of noise source and its impact on the overall noise measurement. For this purpose, the collection of noise sources information requires the application of many techniques, including the recording and labeling of noise events. The latter is a task that is mostly performed manually by experts, using certain types of software, and it is very time-consuming. To improve this task and to take advantage of the rise of new technologies, we propose the design of a game using a mobile application to encourage citizens’ participation in research. The goals of the app are two-fold: to raise awareness of the problems generated by noise and to help experts in the work of pre-labeling sounds for later analysis. We detail the envisioned mechanics of the proposed game, its dynamics and its design.