Noise Exposure Measurements in Communities

When people live in noisy neighborhoods, sometimes they want to know how much noise they’re exposed to—and there’s a smartphone app for that! Including the one that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) released for measuring sound levels. While this particular app was evaluated in a laboratory under ideal conditions, no attempt had been made to assess the accuracy of noise measuring apps outside—until now.

Our ChemRisk team developed a sampling strategy that involved identifying environments where people commonly live, communities where little to no noise exposure data is available. These locations also had various levels, patterns, and characteristics of noise, which allowed for the accuracy of these apps to be comprehensively evaluated. Using traditional dosimeters—sound measuring devices—we compared and evaluated the accuracy of a group of similar smartphone apps.

The result? Freely available smartphone apps were found to be within 2.0 dBA (dBA expresses the loudness of the sound heard by the human ear) of the paired environments where noise levels were stable and more than 75 dBA. The apps are generally suitable for collecting measurements when traditional dosimeters are unavailable—with these apps people have options to determine the levels of noise they’re exposed to in their neighborhoods.