1. Introduction

Assessment and management of environmental noise

According to Noise in Europe, "the excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people's daily activities at school, at work, at home and during leisure time. It can disturb sleep, cause cardiovascular and psychophysiological effects, reduce performance and provoke annoyance responses and changes in social behaviour".

In this context, the reduction of noise is of major importance. As a first step, before reducing noise, one must be in a position to carry out an evaluation of noise in the environment, to establish, in a second time, action plans for reducting noise. For example, in Europe, the EU Directive 2002/49/CE is proposed for the assessment and management of environmental noise, firstly to identify noise pollution levels and, secondly to propose noise management action plans. This evaluation, and latter, the noise management action plans, are currently carried out by using noise maps, resulting from numerical calculations and models, which have a number of limitations that limit the accuracy and the representativity of current noise maps. Instead, one can also use measurements for producing noise maps, but it requires to use many noise sensors in order to obtain a relevant spatial accuracy.

With the development of the concept of participatory measurement, and considering the extremely large number of people equipped with a smartphone while being "in mobility", the use of smartphones is potentially relevant a solution to realize noise maps.