Innovation on user-generated content for environmental noise monitoring and analysis in the context of smart cities

This work presents an approach based on the concept of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) to monitoring environmental noise; it is a problem that specially affects people’s quality of life in urban areas. In this work, mobile devices are used to massively collect environmental noise measurements, which are used to generate maps of a specific area and then make a forecast. The difference of this approach with respect to the traditional methods based on monitoring stations is that it is much less costly, which is a major innovation in developing countries. This approach is based on a GIS approach that consists of an application for mobile devices and a web mapping application; including Geospatial Analysis and Machine Learning methods for the acoustic noise prediction using contextual information. With this approach it will be possible to define actions to mitigate the effects of environmental noise, it is aligned in the context of the smart cities. The proposed case study is based on collecting noise data of the Mexico City.